Peter Kropotkin Quotes

This is a movement. This is not Trump. This is not anything. This is a movement. Remember, it is a movement. We used to say silent majority. It's not a silent majority, it's really a noisy majority.

They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.

For in the first place the American people could not have been swept too fast and too far in this movement without enough alarms being sounded to be heard and heeded.

… the most sacred right [revolution] to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.

In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes, ... it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation's history.

You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action.

Jacksonianism [populism] is always an important force in American politics; at times of social and economic stress and change … its importance tends to grow.

Progressive, radical, or even revolutionary change has always come from below.

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

The point is change can come about, but it only comes about when millions of people are actively involved in political struggle, the billionaires may have the money, but we have the people.

I think this is a moment of a lot of possibilities, and openings. Occupy and the 99% movement are really going to break through, and we are going to create a new economy, an economy that we need that works for everyone. Where everyone works, everyone counts and everyone contributes.

a labor victory must be economic and it must be revolutionizing.

Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

Insurrection: Insurrection as soon as circumstances allow: insurrection, strenuous, ubiquitous: the insurrection of the masses: the holy war of the oppressed: the republic to make republicans: the people in action to initiate progress. Let the insurrection announce with its awful voice the decrees of God: let it clear and level the ground on which its own immortal structure shall be raised. Let it, like the Nile, flood all the country that it is destined to make fertile.

If we can create a climate among people that says that any serious candidate for president, Senate, governor, [the] House is going to have to talk about income inequality, raising wages in America, trade policy - that's a huge success. It's not putting pressure on a candidate. It's mobilizing people.

[Steven] Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore - the redistribution of wealth and the return of '$17 trillion' stolen from the middle class by Wall Street - is to 'destabilize the country.

I do think that our culture or our psyche as a country I guess, the world or whatever, we're due for a huge event. We're due for a little bit of a revolution or a spotlight or a movement. Something that feels large, something that feels like the 60s. Some sort of unification.

Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.

...move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.

Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make non-violence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development, for economic and political justice and for violence control.

The peoples' revolution... will arrange its revolutionary organisation from the bottom up and from the periphery to the centre, in keeping with the principle of liberty.

When I speak to students about the Civil Rights Movement, I say that it is impossible to stop a determined movement that is captivating the American consciousness. I think the candidacy of Sen. Obama represents the beginning of a new movement in American political history that began in the hearts and minds of the people of this nation. And I want to be on the side of the people, on the side of the spirit of history.

To a certain extent I don't see any real need for socialism in the United States immediately, but things change and it may be that there will come a need for partial changes in our economy.

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

The Orange Revolution was a powerful example of democracy around the world. The people of Ukraine are continuing to shape their own future.