Quotes About Social Change

"Belief without action is the ruin of the soul." -Edward Abbey

"One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change." -David Barsamian

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." -Noam Chomsky

"For the times, they are a changin'." -Bob Dylan

"The end of the human race will be that we will eventually die of civilization." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidairty. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists." -Joseph Ettor, IWW organizer.

"The oppressed of the Earth, rising, make their own law." -FOXFIRE

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." -R. Buckminster Fuller

"Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass." -Emma Goldman

"A mind that is stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions." -Oliver Wendell Holmes

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." -Martin Luther King, Jr., "When Silence Is Betrayal," 1967

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." -Martin Luthur King Jr.

"If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room." -Anita Koddick

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point is to change it." -Karl Marx

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead

"Every great change must expect opposition because it shakes the very foundation of privilege." -Lucretia Mott, Quaker abolitionist and women's rights activist

"Insubordination may only be the evidence of a strong mind." -Napoleon

"There is no other pill to take, so swallow the one that makes you ill." -Rage Against the Machine, "Sleep Now in the Fire"

"One must care about a world one will never see." -Bertrand Russell

"Until he extends the circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace." -Albert Schweitzer

"Rise like lions after slumber in invanquishable number — Shake your chains to earth like dew which in sleep had fallen on you — ye are many — they are few." -Percy Bysshe Shelley

"If we once — and for so long — lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again." -John Zerzan

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