26 Quotes About Social-movements

It is a beautiful thing to be on fire for justice… there is no greater joy than inspiring and empowering others––especially the least of these, the precious and priceless wretched of the earth!

In the South, we knew our adversary would stop at nothing to silence our activism. We knew we could never match his readiness to annihilate our resistance. So we ceded him that ground and challenged him instead to defend himself against the work of loving peace.

A critical element in nearly all effective social movements is leadership. For it is through smart, persistent, and authoritative leaders that a movement generates the appropriate concepts and language that captures the frustration, anger, or fear of the group's members and places responsibility where it is warranted.

If you can create a social movement that people want to join, they will bend their energies and ideas to you.

Without or­ganization, ideas, after some initial momentum, start losing their effect. They become routine, degenerate into conformity, and end up simply a memory. I raise this warning because too often, in this short but rich period of our revolution, many great initiatives have failed. They have been forgotten because of the lack of an organiza­tional apparatus needed to keep them going and bring them to frui­tion.

In order to have a happy ending, in order to be triumphant, in order to be heroic, you have to tell your own story. The women's movement knows that; black people know that; brown people know that; yellow people know that. You have to be able to tell your own story in order to show that you are worthy--that you belong.

Leaders who do not help the people must be replaced by the people.

One of the axioms of organizing is that you organize people where they are, and where people are, in much of their lives, is in their communities.

I have always mistrusted the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants," because although I respect and pay homage to the brilliance and resilience of my ancestors, I'm fairly certain that they were not giants, but as powerful and as vulnerable as I am.