Quotes for All
What I feel now is connected to people. I feel connected and I feel a lot of love for people. I feel the possibility of what building social movements and what working together in struggle creates. Whatever that energy is, it feels a lot better than what I felt when I was younger – which … Read more
I think what drives me is a sense of, well, who is going to do it if you don’t do it? I think that one of the things that we’ve seen over time, especially with progressive social movements, is most of them – it’s surprising to people – are sort of driven by that. Eugene … Read more
Feminism is a belief that although women and men are inherently of equal worth, most societies privilege men as a group. As a result, social movements are necessary to achieve political equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies. Estelle Freedman
Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence. Ellen Willis
Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myth that rounds off to unity a social movement. Friedrich Nietzsche
Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience. Freda Adler
All the major social movements of the 20th century had great soundtracks – We need that. The left needs better propaganda, because we don’t have the Koch brothers. It takes a different kind of capital to fight that stuff. DJ Spooky
When social movements engage in legal reform, they often mobilize images of people from their constituent population who most match national norms about what deserving citizens are like, and use those people as spokespeople and as lead plaintiffs in legal cases. This strategy requires that people who are experiencing intersectional harm – who are vulnerable … Read more
We must experiment, fail, and try again, but beginning with a critique of legal reform and a commitment to center the most vulnerable moves us away from some of the most common, obvious pitfalls of neoliberal social movement strategies. Dean Spade
The example of Russia reminds us that keeping up that enormous dead weight of the security apparatus required to enforce the ideological conformity to preempt anything that looks like an alternative or a social movement is destroying capitalism. David Graeber