Sally Kohn Quotes

Turmoil is everywhere, and the whole world is waiting for solutions to come from the top down. That's not how it works - community change from the bottom up makes a real difference.

My personal belief in doing Brand New Congress is that the movement needs something to focus on that's constructive.

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.

Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

Real, sustainable community change requires the initiative and engagement of community members.

Causes was founded with the mission of empowering anyone to change the world. Our model is based upon the belief that everyone has the power to have an outsized impact on the world by banding together with other like-minded individuals, taking direct action, and inspiring their friends and their friends' friends to join in.

The thing about Occupy is that the sentiment the movement embodies is timeless: Don't be greedy, share.

Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That's why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the 'demands' of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world.

If we don't heal our own hood, who will?

I think that rather than saying that Occupy Wall Street has died, we can say that they're in the process of understanding what the long march through alternative institutions might mean.

No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It's because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up and demand - demand - demand change.

Democracy is built from the bottom up, one step at a time.

Change never comes from the White House. It comes from your house and my house.

Democracy, in any active sense, begins and ends in communities small enough for their members to meet face to face.

Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.

People say that the government should be doing this Yeah, but the government is not doing this. So we do.

If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people's lives are better, you know it's hard, and some people think it's boring.

Sometimes it takes a child to raise a village - or to take down an injustice.

I've done community organizing my whole life and I think to myself, as an organizer, we don't wait for people to come to us and say, 'Help us organize something.' We go out into the community, and we bring the skills to a group of people to organize themselves.

For the people of Baltimore, I don't criticize rioting, because I understand it. But after the fires die down, organize, strategize, and mobilize.

I think we need to raise our voices, and we need to demonstrate to the people we represent, as well as the American people, that their leaders have a responsibility to take action.

If we genuinely believe in a bigger future for our country, we have to redistribute both wealth and power - so people can take back control for good, not just for one vote.

Baltimore is a city of possibility, and we've got to challenge the traditional pathways of politics and politicians who lay those paths.

I'm convinced democracy will grow from the ground up, from the community.