Top 100 Social Movement Quotes
#1. The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.
Saul Williams
#2. Social movement in this country has come when people get together,' said Carol Sutton of Norwalk, Conn., the president of a teachers union. It begins in the streets.' Climate marches
Anonymous
#3. Feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor - it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers - it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.
Kavita Ramdas
#4. The "social justice" movement is not at all about social justice, but about relentlessly bullying anyone who does not subscribe to their Stalinist ideology.
Joshua Goldberg
#5. The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco- populism . Ecopopulism ... To change our laws and culture , the green movement justice , political solutions and social change.
Van Jones
#6. The viral power of online media has proven how fast creative ideas can be spread and adopted, using tools like cellphones, digital cameras, micro-credit, mobile banking, Facebook, and Twitter. A perfect example? The way the Green Movement in Iran caught fire thanks to social media.
Tina Brown
#7. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.
Gloria Steinem
#8. The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands.
Rosa Luxemburg
#9. Still, there is space for this secular movement that has become frustrated with the liberal experience. In my opinion, there is a need for an effort that helps he establishment of social justice while taking into consideration all the qualifications and reservations against the welfare state.
Samir Kassir
#10. My presence in the social media and on the Internet is much bigger than many of the other candidates, including Mitt Romney. So, when you take the social media and you take the Tea Party citizens movement, you have a combination there that, quite frankly, 10 years ago, I wouldn't have had a chance.
Herman Cain
#11. Social conditions that spur large numbers of people into action are ignored in favor of a Hollywood version of history focusing on one conquering hero. Since a movement for social change is embodied in its leader, death of the leader means death of the movement.
Patricia Hill Collins
#12. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
Richard Stallman
#13. Storytelling may be what most distinguishes social movements from interest groups.
Marshall Ganz
#14. They're [social media] amazing tools to communicate information - especially about different causes or crises or movements.
Scarlett Johansson
#15. The new social question is: democracy or the rule of the financial markets. We are currently witnessing the end of an era. The neoliberal ideology has failed worldwide. The U.S. movement Occupy Wall Street is a good example of this.
Sigmar Gabriel
#16. The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?
Andy Stern
#17. A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#18. Social Darwinism had continued to flourish in German. Together with Mendelian genetics, it was widely thought to provide a scientific basis for the eugenic 'Racial Hygiene' movement.
Jonathan Glover
#19. You know there's always prejudice in a revolutionary movement.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#20. Music has always pushed ahead social movements and can do much more than just dumb down a populace.
Saul Williams
#21. Come on guys, let's be serious. If you really want to do something, don't just 'like' this post. Write that you are ready, and we can try to start something" [Mustafa Nayyem quoted in Chrystia Freeland, "Euromaidan, Kiev: A Place Becomes A Movement"].
Catie Marron
#22. It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.
Barack Obama
#23. No movement for social change has ever succeeded without 'the militarism component' ... Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out
Ingrid Newkirk
#24. The way you get leaders to care about issues of conscience is to apply political pressure. It's less a question of persuading leaders directly and more trying to build a social movement that holds their feet to the fire.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#25. There will be no equity without solidarity. There will be no justice without a social movement.
Joia Mukherjee
#26. I really want the audience to place close attention to the movement, possibilities of movement, possibilities of trespassing boundaries and observe what's possible in different social settings, and different settings of class designation as well.
Todd Haynes
#27. I think there's a mystery about what a social movement is.
Bernadine Dohrn
#28. What we have found is that because of smartphones and access to media, and because everybody knows how everyone else lives, you have no idea where the next huge social movement is going to erupt.
Jim Yong Kim
#29. Through social media, missing persons are found; sick persons are given chances to live a healthy life. I say, that is the modern bayanihan movement.
Kcat Yarza
#30. There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.
Jonah Goldberg
#31. When it comes to two of the big social earthquakes in the last fifty years - which are the gay movement and the women's movement - I think there is a direct line from Kinsey to those.
Bill Condon
#32. So while the book Giving Back serves as a moving tribute, "The Soul of Philanthropy" exhibit and its programs are meant to compel us toward a triumphant movement of conscious giving for social change.
Valaida Fullwood
#33. There has never been a successful social movement for any minority without the support of the majority.
Hudson Taylor
#34. 'The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movement in Iraq,' by Hanna Batatu. Few may wish to take on this massive, obscure work, but it changed my life, and I love it.
Adam Davidson
#35. The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.
Bell Hooks
#36. Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.
Jerry Brown
#37. Human beings with all their faults and strengths constitute the mechanism of a social movement. They must make mistakes and learn from them, make more mistakes and learn anew. They must taste defeat as well as success, and discover how to live with each. Time and action are the teachers.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#38. I am the CEO and co-founder of Purpose - a social movement incubator and agency. We work on ways to help millions of people combine their power as citizens, consumers and cultural agents.
Jeremy Heimans
#39. I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian- Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.
Adolf Hitler
#40. Feminism is the single most powerful social movement of our time, one that addresses every aspect of human and social life.
Richard Allen Epstein
#41. The social potential movement is on the threshold of a mass awakening, seeking to carry into society what individuals have learned spiritually and personally.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#42. The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
Thorstein Veblen
#43. And so worship is bound up with all three dimensions of the circular movement: the personal, the social, and the universal.
Pope Benedict XVI
#44. As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social idea of the movement.
Adolf Hitler
#45. I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.
John Dufresne
#46. When do corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country.
Ralph Nader
#47. A social democratic party without deep roots in the working class movement would quickly fade into an unrepresentative intellectual sect.
Roy Jenkins
#48. A privileging of individual rights over group goods can lead to serious problems, as we've seen with the antivaccination movement.
Emily Matchar
#49. History is the product of vast, amorphous and indecipherable social movements.
Leo Tolstoy
#50. If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data. If you meet people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart.
Paul Hawken
#51. We are not a religious tradition with a creed, but a religious movement that has always wedded social justice work to theology
James Luther Adams
#52. The words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.
Christopher McDougall
#53. In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi's campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.
Barack Obama
#54. It's a bit odd that nobody seems to be using the correct technical term to describe organized Islamic terrorists. They are not a faction of a religion or a social movement. They are a cult. A suicide cult.
Craig Bruce
#55. The impulse of humanity toward social progress is like the movement in the currents of a great water system, from myriad sources and under myriad circumstances and conditions, beating onward, ever onward toward its eternity, the Ocean.
Anna Julia Cooper
#56. Social evolution is demonstrated by movement towards unity, not separatism.
Neale Donald Walsch
#57. Filipinos are not worse than any other colonized people except that our colonization was a little longer, and the independence movement was always dictated in political terms, never in social ones. We borrowed terms, but we didn't understand them.
Ferdinand Marcos
#58. WHILE MUSIC alone can unlock people with parkinsonism, and movement or exercise of any kind is also beneficial, an ideal combination of music and movement is provided by dance (and dancing with a partner, or in a social setting, brings to bear other therapeutic dimensions).
Oliver Sacks
#59. The diversity of voices, issues, approaches, and processes required to make feminism work as an inclusive social movement is precisely the kind of knotty, unruly insurrection that just can't be smoothed into a neat brand.
Andi Zeisler
#60. I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.
Niall Ferguson
#61. The essence of trade unionism is social uplift. The labor movement has been the haven for the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected, the downtrodden, the poor.
A. Philip Randolph
#62. Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.
Ellen Willis
#63. To a man with an internet connection, every thought and every movement sounds like a tweet or status update.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#64. As a political movement, feminism seeks to transform society by challenging and changing social institutions. Religion, on the other hand, seeks first to transform individuals through a personal relationship with God, which then results in a desire to work for the transformation of society.
Helen LaKelly Hunt
#65. We Social-Democrats always stand for democracy, not "in the name of capitalism," but in the name of clearing the path for our movement, which clearing is impossible without the development of capitalism.
Vladimir Lenin
#66. One way the Tea Party has benefited female candidates - and the conservative movement generally - is by consciously steering clear of social issues.
Hanna Rosin
#67. I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women's movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.
Richard Lamm
#68. Importantly, the demand for day-care services to be provided by social insurance came from textile workers and not from the Mexican feminist movement.
Michelle L. Dion
#69. movement behind us, each of us had to overcome deeply held values and traditional social strictures. The struggle was personally painful and
Lynn Povich
#70. For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change.
Mike McCurry
#71. That Newton shuddered now [at slavery] is a testimony to they way a strong social movement can awaken a conscience..
Adam Hochschild
#72. How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement! My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all.
Adolf Hitler
#73. Any social movement throughout history has always been carried out by only 7% of population being passionately active in that.
Paul Watson
#74. The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things ... They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Karl Marx
#75. Wrong is an addictive, repetitive story; Right is where the movement is.
Paul Hawken
#76. The contemporary Planned Parenthood movement was started by a woman named Margaret Sanger, who defended abortion rights on the basis of eugenics, the search for "good genes" based on the racist and evolutionary notions of "social Darwinism" prevalent in her day.
Russell D. Moore
#77. The future is a process, not a destination. Richard Stallman is a guy my age. I sympathize with Richard rather more than I sympathize with Richard's open-source ideas, but the guy's a mortal human being and so is his social movement. Open-source is a means of production.
Bruce Sterling
#78. Kennedy saw the insurgency as a anti-colonial, essentially nationalist movement, feeding on social discontent. So you don't shoot people.
Roger Hilsman
#79. I think that if the political and social movement groups and organizations that operate in this country today had the same kind of energetic commitment that the medical marijuana people have, many things could change in this country.
John Trudell
#80. Every person that steps up and commits to social change helps solidify the black movement cause. It is not easy for those who fill in the leader role.
Assata Shakur
#81. It gets to whether we're a teacher-education model or a movement for social justice. I would say we're about the latter.
Wendy Kopp
#82. This World Youth movement claims to represent and affect the politico-social activities of a grand total of forty million adherents - under the age of thirty ... It may play an important and increasing role in the consolidation of a new world order.
H.G.Wells
#83. The women's suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.
Winston Churchill
#84. We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.
Toni Morrison
#85. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
Friedrich Engels
#86. The social issues outside of football are not as defined as they were earlier, when integration took place and certain rights were legislated. The Civil Rights movement is over. Individuals can buy homes wherever they want, travel first class wherever they want, eat wherever they want.
Jim Brown
#87. For me, the beauty of feminism is that it is a social and political movement that has redefined the power and obligation of the self: self-possession and self-regulation as a tool for social reform.
Vivian Gornick
#88. The greatest adventure that can happen to a human being is the movement from mind to no-mind, the movement from personality to individuality. The no-mind has an individuality: the mind is social.
Rajneesh
#89. METAPHOR: A tightly fitting suit of metal, generally tin, which entirely encloses the wearer, both impeding free movement and preventing emotional expression and/or social contact.
Chris Ware
#90. I am not saying that the Renaissance in any way was a feminist movement - hardly. But the arts flourished, and in more social settings as opposed to being confined to the church.
Kathryn Lasky
#91. That's why I'm not on social media. People are way too open about their private lives. I don't need to see pictures of what somebody had for lunch or hear about how difficult their last bowel movement was or see on a map where they were when either one happened.
Janet Evanovich
#92. The nation demands a movement which has written upon its banner the internal and external national freedom that it will act as if it were the spiritual, social and political conscience of the nation.
Franz Von Papen
#93. Technology, including Zaadz, will allow us to evade the jerks far more than we could before. The technology-based social responsibility movement, broadly construed, will allow us to return to some extent to the moral monitoring of small villages.
Michael Strong
#94. Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.
Jessica Valenti
#95. Let there be freedom from perturbations with respect to the things which come from the external cause; and let there be justice in the things done by virtue of the internal cause, that is, let there be movement and action terminating in this, in social acts, for this is according to thy nature.
Marcus Aurelius
#96. The work of popular education, the temperance movement, the peace movement, are to a great extent carried on by the young. Their meetings show that the young understand one of their tasks: that of bringing together the different classes through social intercourse.
Ellen Key
#97. Even if it's a "talking head documentary" about a social movement or something along those lines, I've always thought of editing the timing and the sense of the piece for the theatrical experience.
Robert Greene
#98. In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was wanting, the attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and well-planned.
Adolf Hitler
#99. The commune movement is part of a reawakening of belief in the possibilities for utopia that existed in the nineteenth century and exist again today, a belief that by creating the right social institution, human satisfaction and growth can be achieved.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
#100. Today women in many countries are taking part in various types of movements of protest, some of which are serious struggles for economic and social emancipation .
Kumari Jayawardena
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