Richard Benjamin Quotes

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.

Philly is a place where people love change as long as things stay the same for them.

Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.

A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples.

When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You're part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important.

You know, I was a community activist, so I'm used to standing out in front of an elected official's office and protesting.

You can't jam change down the American people's throat.

Latin Americans glorify their past so ceaselessly that they make it almost impossible to advocate change.

I'm fascinated by how ethnic communities have assimilated into massive capitalist environments.

We have traditions, attitudes, an attachment to social welfare and even if change is desirable, we won’t accept change overnight.

Those who perpetrate these brutal acts against our people should know that they are not going to change our way of life.

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.

It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation - that we're all in this together, that we all have a voice - and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities.

I think it's hard for an outsider to capture the flavor of a community and all its nuances, so ultimately Haitian-Americans need to start sharing intimate accounts of their stories.

Culture has always been more important than politics. Sometimes culture is a mirror that reflects what is; sometimes it's a search-light pointing the way to what will be.

The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.

This is what it's all about. From what I could see, you could get a bunch of people together, whip up the press and have some impact.

We can see that the complexity we witness inside the African-American community today has always been there. Black people were just as noble and just as ignoble as anybody else.

Nerdighters make me believe in America again.

The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displace by new patterns.... All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?

An enlightened person raises the level of the consciousness of the entire community.

We have very stable mechanisms of conflict resolution in terms of labor relations, we have a very good transportation infrastructure, we provide our children with an excellent education and the gap between rich and poor in Germany is relatively narrow. On the other hand, we have trouble accepting change.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.