Social Movements Quotes - Page 2

• ...in place of the Old Bottom Line of money and power, a New Bottom Line of Love and Generosity is possible. People of all faiths need to shape a political and social movement that reaffirms the most generous, peace-oriented, social justice-committed, and loving truths of the spiritual heritage of the human race.

  Michael Lerner

  Love, God, Faith

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• I think there's a mystery about what a social movement is.

  Bernardine Dohrn

  Thinking, Movement, Mystery

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• That generation really has to fight for a new political language, social movements, and alliances with students from other countries. They have to convince labor, parents, and the general public that the fight over higher education is a fight that benefits everyone in a sustainable democracy and not just faculty and students.

  Henry Giroux

  Country, Fighting, Political Language

  "Higher Education Under Attack". Interview with C. Cryn Johannsen, www.truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.

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• I am not against identity politics or single based issues; at the same time, we need to find ways to connect these singular modes of politics to broader political narratives about democracy so we can recognize their strengths and limitations in building broad-based social movements. In short, we need to find new ways to connect education to the struggle for democracy that is under assault in ways that were unimaginable forty years ago.

  Henry Giroux

  Struggle, Issues, Identity Politics

  "Higher Education Under Attack: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux". Interview with C Cryn Johannsen, www.truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.

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• 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

  Mean, Ideas, Guy

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• We must experiment, fail, and try again, but beginning with a critique of legal reform and a commitment to center the most vulnerable moves us away from some of the most common, obvious pitfalls of neoliberal social movement strategies.

  Dean Spade

  Moving, Commitment, Trying

  "On Normal Life". Interview with Natalie Oswin, societyandspace.org. January 15, 2014.

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• Even if you think it is right for Bill Cosby to face charges, it`s impossible to ignore that the system which just charged him is a system that has been indicted by a national social movement, as being unable or unwilling to deliver meaningful and just outcomes.

  Melissa Harris-Perry

  Meaningful, Thinking, Movement

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• Stock prices are likely to be among the prices that are relatively vulnerable to purely social movements because there is no accepted theory by which to understand the worth of stocks....investors have no model or at best a very incomplete model of behavior of prices, dividend, or earnings, of speculative assets.

  Robert J. Shiller

  Investing, Movement, Earning

  "Martket Volatility". Book by Robert J. Shiller, www.businessinsider.com. 1992.

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• When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not fall in meekly behind them. We who protest...are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.

  Howard Zinn

  Fall, Challenges, Roles

  "Are We Politicians or Citizens?" by Howard Zinn, progressive.org. May 1, 2007.

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• A new breed of Americans born out of the social movements of the 60s and grown into a majority in the 70s holds a set of values so markedly different from the traditional outlook that they promise to transform the character of work in America in the 80s.

  Daniel Yankelovich

  Work, Character, America

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• We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

  Todd Gitlin

  Movement, May, Awful

  "How to be radical?". The OpenDemocracy Interview, www.opendemocracy.net. April 5, 2011.

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• All the major social movements of the 20th century had great soundtracks - We need that. The left needs better propaganda, because we don’t have the Koch brothers. It takes a different kind of capital to fight that stuff.

  DJ Spooky

  Brother, Fighting, Different

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• Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

  Thomas Szasz

  Vocabulary, Expectations, Political

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.27, Syracuse University Press

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• If you look at social movements in Latin America, there are spaces where alternative politics are thought about on the ground, at the grassroots level, but they are always under threat. The problem in North Africa and the Middle East is the politics of oil. It means that the spaces for truly grassroots politics, involving those masses of people excluded from high politics, are very quickly closed down. They are not really allowed any kind of autonomy to develop, and that seems to be the real problem, which gets us back to the neo-colonial relationship.

  Nigel Gibson

  Real, Latin, Mean

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• But we need more than a broader understanding of what is a good society or a moral and political critique of the existing market fundamentalism engulfing American society, we also need to create new forms of solidarity, new and broad based social movements that move beyond the isolated and fractured politics of the current historical moment.

  Henry Giroux

  Moving, Political, Understanding

  "Higher Education Under Attack: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux". Interview with C Cryn Johannsen, truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.

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• Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador lived through times of cruel and ruthless capitalism where the workers, the masses of the population, saw themselves living in a precarious state of employment and subsistence conditions. The impact of this reality took hold and impacted the evolution of the social situation of those countries and even though that produced movements that were not exactly political movements but social movements.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Country, Reality, Impact

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• If we are going to talk about the most recent of the "Indignados" movements in several countries of the world, including Europe, those are social movements but eventually they will evolve into political movements. This will happen because the traditional bourgeois parties have lost credibility after being the main political influence in most countries of Latin-America and Europe in the last 50 or 60 years.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Country, Latin, Party

  "The Future of Cuba". Interview with Lasonas Pipinis Velasco, www.counterpunch.org. February 27, 2015.

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• The problem with Antigone is that she stood up to the despot Creon, but in such a way that she ended up dying. So she bought her defiance with her death. The real question I ended up asking was, "What would it mean for Antigone to have stood up to Creon and lived?" And the only way she could have lived is if she had had a serious social movement with her. If she arrived with a social movement to take down the despot, maybe it would have taken 18 days only, like in Egypt. It's really important to be able to re-situate one's rage and destitution in the context of a social movement.

  Judith Butler

  Real, Taken, Mean

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The example of Russia reminds us that keeping up that enormous dead weight of the security apparatus required to enforce the ideological conformity to preempt anything that looks like an alternative or a social movement is destroying capitalism.

  David Graeber

  Russia, Movement, Weight

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Wherever I found resistance to oppression, whether in Africa, in Latin America, certainly here in America in the South, I joined that resistance. I took part in the labor movement, in social movements, in the church community. I felt that it was the honorable thing to do and still do.

  Harry Belafonte

  Latin, America, Community

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

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• 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

  Editing, Talking, Pieces

  "Performance as Documentary: An Interview with Robert Greene (Web Exclusive)". Interview with Erik Luers, www.cineaste.com.

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• The kind of organic wave, the way that waves move, and I'm not just talking about feminism, the way that a social movement might rise like a wave. It's harder to build any kind of wave now. Things are important to you and then they recede within a day. That's the only thing that keeps me from believing that there's going to be any one organic big wave; although the Americana (music) thing has been happening for a while.

  Dar Williams

  Moving, Believe, Talking

  Interview with Gregg Shapiro, chicago.gopride.com. November 3, 2016.

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• In other words, "speaking truth" as a social movement may move you forward in some ways, but to really lock in and have real enduring change, it takes both a movement on the ground and an independent political party that is itself the defiance of that two-party corporate big-money control of politics.

  Jill Stein

  Real, Moving, Party

  Source: www.pqmonthly.com

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• When Paul [Greengrass] was writing, he'd send me story ideas that he had. He was particularly interested in social movements and revolutions that had been happening all over the world, and how computers and the internet had helped those movements. He encouraged me to read a book about Anonymous, the hacker group called "white hat" hackers, meaning they're driven by ideology and social disruption as opposed to just greed.

  Julia Stiles

  Book, Writing, Ideas

  Interview with Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. July 29, 2016.

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• [I like] Victor Jara and the music of Chile, and the social movement in Chile.

  Jill Stein

  Movement, Social, Chile

  Source: www.politico.com

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