Eric Liu > Quotes

“If you don’t learn how to practice power, someone else will do it for you—in your name, on your turf, with your voice, and often against your interests.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“There was an omnivorous intellect that won him the family sobriquet of Walking Encyclopedia.”
― Eric Liu

“Power justifies itself, in countless small ways. But one of the big ways it does so is by creating an ideological narrative about how things got to be this way—and what must now change. These narratives are more than technical explanations. They are epic morality tales, and they typically follow this sequence: Paradise Paradise Lost Paradise Redeemed”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“warns about the dangers of treating art and creativity as commodities. A commodity mindset deadens human bonds of trust and affection.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“The Bechdel-Wallace test is a similarly simple device, created by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, for evaluating whether movies and television shows perpetuate gender inequity. Does a film have at least two named women in it, talking to each other, about something other than a man? A depressingly large number of films and shows fail the test. But it does more than scold. It suggests an alternate reality—an achievable one—in which women have an equal presence in mass popular culture, and the screen represents more than just the gaze of a (non-feminist) man.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“uses a method for organizing that centers on three nested narratives: the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. He teaches organizers entering into any setting to start not with policy proposals or high concepts like justice but with biographies—their own, and those of the people they hope to mobilize. What are the stories you tell about yourself? Why do you tell them that way? How can we find connections across our stories of origin that build trust and common cause?”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“America today is in danger of drifting from its best traditions. We have allowed false prophets of selfishness to obscure our vision. We have grown numb to a creeping cynicism about progress and public life. We crave human connection yet hide behind walls. We worship the money chase yet decry the toll it exacts on us. We allow the market to dominate our lives, relationships, yearnings and aspirations. We indulge in nostalgia and irony and addictive entertainment, then purge from our hearts any true idealism or passion, any notion that being American should mean something more than "everyday low prices" or "every man for himself." In the midst of this dislocation and disorientation, so many Americans today yearn for higher purpose, for calling--for some assurance that life matters. We wish to believe there is more to our days than is revealed on our screens. Make no mistake: this is a spiritual crisis.”
― Eric Liu, The True Patriot

“• First, power concentrates. That is, it feeds on itself and compounds (as does powerlessness). • Second, power justifies itself. People invent stories to legitimize the power they have (or lack). • Third, power is infinite. There is no inherent limit on the amount of power people can create.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“If you want to change the story that justifies current structures of power and privilege, you must have such a combination of bold goals and specific steps.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“In our country, there is so much that’s wrong with the way we deliver care to the aging, the very young, and the infirm. But you can’t beat something with nothing. It is not enough to decry what’s broken. You have to describe the alternative and make it possible for people to believe in it. To care.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“With food still scarce,there was no longer a right to exist. You needed to earn your spot. ”
― Eric Liu, Re:union

“the “etiquette of freedom,” to use poet Gary Snyder’s phrase. It encompasses small acts like teaching your children to be honest in their dealings with others. It includes serving on community councils and as soccer coaches. It means leaving a place in better shape than you found it. It means helping others during hard times and being able to ask for help. It means resisting the temptation to call a problem someone else’s.  ”
― Eric Liu, The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government

“Every person and institution with power in our society today has it because we give it to them.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“oo many people are profoundly illiterate in power (TED Talk: Why ordinary people need to understand power). As a result, it’s become ever easier for those who do understand how power operates in civic life to wield a disproportionate influence and fill the void created by the ignorance of the majority.”
― eric liu, The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government

“Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized--and therefore more susceptible to despotism.

He warned that if the "habits of the heart" fed by civic clubs and active self-government evaporated, citizens would regress to pure egoism. They would stop thinking about things greater than their immediate circle. Public life would disappear. And that would only accelerate their own disempowerment.

This is painfully close to a description of the United States since Trump and Europe since Brexit. And the only way to reverse this vicious cycle of retreat and atrophy is to reverse it: to find a sense of purpose that is greater than the self, and to exercise power with others and for others in democratic life.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“By deliberately withholding power, you generate more. By choosing to redirect it, you remember that the choice is yours. Such acts remind us how much dormant civic power we actually have—and how infrequently we ever activate that potential in full.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“And that brings me to my definition of power, which is simply this: the capacity to make others do what you would have them do. It sounds menacing, doesn't it? We don't like to talk about power. We find it scary. We find it somehow evil. We feel uncomfortable naming it. In the culture and mythology of democracy, power resides with the people.”
― Eric Liu, The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government

“I want you to write a narrative, a narrative from the future of your city, and you can date it, set it out one year from now, five years from now, a decade from now, a generation from now, and write it as a case study looking back, looking back at the change that you wanted in your city, looking back at the cause that you were championing, and describing the ways that that change and that cause came, in fact, to succeed. Describe the values of your fellow citizens that you activated, and the sense of moral purpose that you were able to stir. Recount all the different ways that you engaged the systems of government, of the marketplace, of social institutions, of faith organizations, of the media. Catalog all the skills you had to deploy, how to negotiate, how to advocate, how to frame issues, how to navigate diversity in conflict, all those skills that enabled you to bring folks on board and to overcome resistance. What you'll be doing when you write that narrative is you'll be discovering how to read power, and in the process, how to write power. So share what you write, do you what you write, and then share what you do.
[...] Together, we can create a great network of city that will be the most powerful collective laboratory for self-government this planet has ever seen. We have the power to do that.”
― Eric Liu

“The market is the first force that has led to the shriveling of citizenship. The classic case is the Wal-Mart effect. A town has a Main Street of small businesses and mom-and-pop shops. The shopkeepers and their customers have relationships that are not just about economic transactions but are set in a context of family, neighborhood, people, and place. Then Wal-Mart comes to town. It offers lower prices. It offers convenience. Because of its scale and might in the marketplace, it can compensate its workers stingily and drive out competition.   The presence of Wal-Mart leads the townspeople to think of themselves primarily as consumers, and to shed other aspects of their identities, like being neighbors or parishioners or friends. As consumers first, they gravitate to the place with the lowest prices. Wal-Mart thrives. The small businesses struggle and lay off workers. They cut back on their sponsorship of tee ball, their support of the food bank. As the mom-and-pops give way to the big box, and commutes become necessary, lives become more frenetic and stressful. People see each other less often. The sense of mutual obligation that townsfolk once shared starts to evaporate. Microhabits of caring and sociability fall away. In this tableau of libertarian citizenship, market forces triumph and everyone gets better deals—yet everyone is now in many senses poorer.”
― Eric Liu, The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government

“What I think you think about what I want creates storms of behaviour that change what is.”
― Eric Liu, The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government

“Remind yourself and others that power is in fact infinite—that we can create it where it does not exist. Our final strategy for doing that is simply this: act powerful. When we act powerful we become powerful. That plays out in the poses and stances we strike in civic life, in the art we make together in everyday life, and in the reality of minority rule.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“Meaning, though, changes with time; text with context. What am I to do? There was a time, as in the minutes after we learned of my father’s death, when those words or words roughly like them, uttered in panic, escaped my mother’s lips. Today, after so many years of lonely meditation, and so many conversations with me that describe but a fraction of those meditations, and so many outings and travels with her Bon Sisters and other friends to explore beyond those meditations, my mother says the words with new meaning. Today she asks the question with what Zen Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” A lack of preconception, a reflexive resistance to rutted thinking. A life-sustaining curiosity that takes each moment as a fresh start. What am I to do? has become, for my seventy-seven-year-old mother, What might I do?”
― Eric Liu, A Chinaman's Chance: One Family's Journey and the Chinese American Dream

“we exist today because this is how our ancestors behaved. We evolve today by ensuring that our definition of "our group" os wide enough to take advantage of diversity and narrow enough to be actionable.”
― Eric Liu, The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government

“Far too many Americans are illiterate in power — what it is, how it operates and why some people have it. As a result, those few who do understand power wield disproportionate influence over everyone else. “We need to make civics sexy again,” says civics educator Eric Liu. “As sexy as it was during the American Revolution or the Civil Rights Movement.”
― Eric Liu

“Money accumulation by the rich is not the same as wealth creation by a society. If we are serious about creating wealth, our focus should not be on taking care of the rich so that their money trickles down; it should be on making sure everyone has a fair chance--in education, health, social capital, access to financial capital-- to create new information and ideas. Innovation arises from a fertile environment that allows individual genius to bloom and that amplifies individual genius, through cooperation, to benefit society. Extreme concentration of wealth kills prosperity in precisely the same way that untended weeds overrun and then kill gardens.”
― Eric Liu, The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government

“It was there, during the 1960s, that his evolution into a firebrand revolutionary began. He became a vocal leader in the emerging Chicano movement. He joined black student activist Larry Gossett, Native American leader Bernie Whitebear, and Asian American leader Bob Santos to create multiracial coalitions for justice in education, policing, immigration, and other issues. Together they became masters of organizing and direct action. The so-called Four Amigos were bonded by personal chemistry. But they also recognized that in predominantly white Seattle, they were stronger together.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“The average American is heard only if wealthy donors happen to be saying the same thing.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“We are particularly frustrated that so much of our politics today consists of lines first written during the clashes, domestic and foreign, of the 1960s. This "Groundhog Day" approach to replaying the culture war's tropes is perhaps nowhere in greater evidence than in how Americans talk about patriotism. Patriotism, as an idea, has been co-opted over the course of a generation by right-wingers who use the flag not as a symbol of transcendent national unity, but as a sectarian cudgel against the hippies, Francophiles, free-lovers and tree-huggers who constitute their caricature of the American left. The American left, for its part, has been so beaten down by this star-spangled caricature that it has largely ceded the very notion of patriotism to the right. As a result, the first reaction of far too many progressives to any talk of patriotism is automatic, allergic recoil. Needless to say, this reaction simply tightens the screws of the right's imprisoning caricature.”
― Eric Liu, The True Patriot

“This is why it is so fundamental for us right now to grab hold of this idea of power and to democratize it. One of the things that is so profoundly exciting and challenging about this moment is that as a result of this power illiteracy that is so pervasive, there is a concentration of knowledge, of understanding, of clout. I mean, think about it: How does a friendship become a subsidy? Seamlessly, when a senior government official decides to leave government and become a lobbyist for a private interest and convert his or her relationships into capital for their new masters. How does a bias become a policy? Insidiously, just the way that stop-and-frisk, for instance, became over time a bureaucratic numbers game. How does a slogan become a movement? Virally, in the way that the Tea Party, for instance, was able to take the "Don't Tread on Me" flag from the American Revolution, or how, on the other side, a band of activists could take a magazine headline, "Occupy Wall Street," and turn that into a global meme and movement. The thing is, though, most people aren't looking for and don't want to see these realities. So much of this ignorance, this civic illiteracy, is willful. There are some millennials, for instance, who think the whole business is just sordid. They don't want to have anything to do with politics. They'd rather just opt out and engage in volunteerism. There are some techies out there who believe that the cure-all for any power imbalance or power abuse is simply more data, more transparency. There are some on the left who think power resides only with corporations, and some on the right who think power resides only with government, each side blinded by their selective outrage. There are the naive who believe that good things just happen and the cynical who believe that bad things just happen, the fortunate and unfortunate unlike who think that their lot is simply what they deserve rather than the eminently alterable result of a prior arrangement, an inherited allocation, of power.”
― Eric Liu

“a result of this creeping public fatalism, we now have depressingly low levels of civic participation, knowledge, engagement, and awareness. Political life has been subcontracted out to a band of professionals—money people, message people, outreach people. The rest of us are made to feel like amateurs, as in suckers. We become demotivated to learn more about how things work. And this pervasive power illiteracy becomes, in a vicious cycle, both a cause and a consequence of the concentration of opportunity, wealth, and clout in society.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen