Social Movement Quotes

“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, The Birth of Tragedy

“Leaders who do not help the people must be replaced by the people.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“There are many [...] sites across the United States, entire landscapes that have been left to rot after they were no longer useful to frackers, miners, and drillers. It's a lot like how this culture treats people. It's certainly how we have been trained to treat our stuff - use it once, or until it breaks, then throw it away and buy some more. It's similar to what has been done to so many workers in the neoliberal period: they are used up and then abandoned to addiction and despair. It's what the entire carceral state is about: locking up huge sectors of the population who are more economically valuable as prison laborers and numbers on the spreadsheet of a private prison than they are as free workers.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.”
― Toni Morrison

“Far from being marginalized, as is presently the case, nineteenth-century freethought was a social movement at the core of our national life.”
― Fred Whitehead, Free-Thought on the American Frontier

“Walking back home that afternoon, I felt more aware of the poverty and opulence on every sidewalk—we brushed past a raven-haired lady with a thousand-dollar handbag and a skinny child with toeless shoes begging for change.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“I began a new project: a photo-essay about the Occupy Wall Street movement that was overtaking Manhattan. Inspired, I snapped hundreds of photographs, wanting to document this singular moment in New York’s pulsing body, watching people flooding the sidewalks like human rivers, converging at the green park as one ocean. I took shots of the sharpest signs and strangest masks; the angry bankers in their crisp blue button-downs; the lines of bored-faced cops, slouching with thick arms crossed. And peering through my viewfinder, I learned the skill of noticing more deeply; I felt a thrill—a new civil affinity budding in my dreams and in the brick-and-mortar city, simultaneously: that we, the people, were awakening to the truth that a bundle of twigs is inconceivably strong.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“...[W]hen women do explode with rage, even if the effect is to catalyze a social movement, their anger will never be recorded, never noted, never recalled or understood as nation-reshaping. The fact that we can often only register the fury of white men as heroic is so established that it would verge on the comical if it weren't so deeply tragic.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“ইতিহাসে দেখা যায়, বাংলাদেশের সামাজিক আন্দোলনগুলো কখনোই নির্দলীয় ছিল না, ছিল সর্বদলীয়।”
― Anupam Debashis Roy, কালকের আন্দোলন, আজকের আন্দোলন: শাহবাগ ও তার পূর্বাপর আন্দোলনের রাজনৈতিক অর্থনীতি

“We have seen viruses which reproduced themselves in packs to do evil, but we have also seen the atom, which when split in half, destroy itself and the viruses, thus, generating a power never seen on the face of the Earth.
A little bit later in eternity, we have met with the nucleus whose individual fission produces in profusion more than what the atom ever imagined. - On the Power of the Little Guy”
― Lamine Pearlheart, Awakening

“We have seen viruses which reproduced themselves in packs to do evil, but we have also seen the atom, which when split in half, destroys itself and the viruses, thus, generating a power never seen on the face of the Earth.
A little bit later in eternity, we have met with the nucleus whose individual fission produces in profusion more than what the atom ever imagined. - On the Power of the Little Guy”
― Lamine Pearlheart, Awakening

“In October 2017, bombshell reporting from the New York Times and The New Yorker revealed that dozens of women, including high-profile actresses, had accused top film producer Harvey Weinstein of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. The number of Weinstein accusers would eventually total more than eighty, with accusations that stretched back thirty years. Ten days after the story broke, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Within twenty-four hours, more than 12 million social-media posts referenced #MeToo, and the viral social feminism campaign soon spread across eighty-five countries. Alyssa Milano quickly credited the phrase “#MeToo” to its originator, the activist Tarana Burke, who coined the phrase in 2006 as a way to raise awareness and promote solidarity among women of color who’d suffered sexual assault.”
― Kelly Loudenberg, Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine

“As more brands and corporations hurried to hop on the #MeToo train, they changed their messaging to raise awareness about issues concerning women. Nike launched the “Until We All Win” campaign to promote gender equality and empowerment. The condom brands Durex and Trojan focused their ad campaigns on sexual consent and sexual assault. Twitter bought its first-ever television ad during the 2018 Oscars, a sixty-second black-and-white spot focused on female empowerment and promoting a newly minted hashtag: #HereWeAre. Now these corporate brands could be concerned and “active,” without directly and materially addressing the systemic issues plaguing women, like poverty and healthcare.”
― Kelly Loudenberg, Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine

“Within the civic space, we tend to see Creators in three roles: creating messages, creating art, and educating others.”
― Sami Sage, Democracy in Retrograde: How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and in Our Lives

“We live in a world where justice is never simply handed over. It has to be demanded, and then demanded over and over again. For every great social movement in history, it has taken the unique wisdom and strength of every generation united to move the needle toward change.”
― Jamie Margolin, Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It