Organizer Quotes

• I am an organizer, not a union leader. A good organizer has to work hard and long. There are no shortcuts. You just keep talking to people, working with them, sharing, exchanging and they come along.

  Cesar Chavez

  Leadership, Hard Work, Talking

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• True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.

  Saul Alinsky

  Cutting, Hair, Radicalism

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.

  Saul Alinsky

  Change, Despair, Social

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• I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

  Mother Jones

  Men, Shoes, Economic Inequality

  "Autobiography of Mother Jones" by Mary Harris Jones, edited by Mary Field Parton, (p. 46), 2004.

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• Right now we have an economy in trouble, and someone who spent their career in the economy is more suited to help fix the economy than someone who spent his life in politics and as a community organizer.

  Mitt Romney

  Careers, Community, Helping

  "Romney Defends Bain Record, Hits Obama on Economy: ‘He Just Doesn’t Have a Clue’". swampland.time.com. May 23, 2012.

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• He has made us the master organizers of the world . . . to overwhelm the forces of reaction throught the earth . . . . This is the divine mission of America . . . . We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. [Progressive]

  Albert J. Beveridge

  Inspirational, God, Usa

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• An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations.

  Saul Alinsky

  Reality, Doe, Different

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• Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs.

  Sara Paretsky

  Summer, Running, Religious

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.

  Saul Alinsky

  Reality, World, Rules For Radicals

  Saul Alinsky (2010). “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals”, p.19, Vintage

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• We are organizers at heart. Most of us in the movement take great pride in being able to put things together.

  Cesar Chavez

  Heart, Pride, Together

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• I must consider the organizer as more important than the discoverer.

  Wolfgang Ostwald

  Science, Discovery, Important

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• An organizer is a leader who does not lead but gets behind the people and pushes.

  Fred Ross

  People, Leader, Doe

  Fred Ross, Sr. “Axioms for Organizers: Trailblazer for Social Justice”, Fred Ross, Sr.

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• A good organizer is key to anyone with a busy social life.

  Neil Strauss

  Keys, Busy, Social

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• My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background.

  Chris Hayes

  Mother, Teacher, Father

  "Chris Hayes: 'I grew up in the Bronx'" by Dylan Byers, www.politico.com. March 28, 2013.

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• Keith Ellison is an organizer's organizer.He's one of the only Muslims in Congress, so you have a big statement there.

  Van Jones

  Keith, Congress, Bigs

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• The American movement, Tea Party, whatever you want to call it, I think that is a very hopeful moment for the country and, I know, we really are the community organizers, are we not?

  Laura Ingraham

  Country, Party, Thinking

  Source: www.glennbeck.com

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• The organizers and perpetuators of segregation are as much the enemy of America as any foreign invader.

  Bayard Rustin

  America, Enemy, Segregation

  Bayard Rustin (2003). “Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin”, p.82, Simon and Schuster

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• Philosophy is like a normal personal organizer, but it's smaller than a matchbox.

  Oscar Wilde

  Philosophy, Normal, Matchboxes

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• I'd been arrested many times by then. I'd been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].

  Bill Ayers

  Years, Three, Changed

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I call myself an addicted organizer.

  Dolores Huerta

  Source: www.sdfoundation.org

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• I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.

  Bob Gunton

  Father, Son, Knights

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I decided to become a community organizer ... Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

  Barack Obama

  Powerful, Roots, Community

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.133, Canongate Books

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• I think I'm a great organizer. Not that I'm organized, but I'm a great organizer of other people.

  Jerry Bruckheimer

  Thinking, People, Organized

  "Jerry Bruckheimer Predicts U.S. Film Will No Longer Dominate Internationally". "The Hollywood Masters" with Stephen Galloway, www.hollywoodreporter.com. October 27, 2015.

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• I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Symphony, Wife, Way

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• Men don't like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives - agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate.

  Saul Alinsky

  Passion, Men, Bridges

  "Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals" by Saul Alinsky, (pp. xxi-xxii), 1971.

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