Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.
We should work with the principle that a work that can be done at a lower level should never be escalated to a higher level.
Progressive, radical, or even revolutionary change has always come from below.
This party [the Progressive Party] comes from the grass roots. It has grown from the soil of the people's hard necessities.
Bull Moose Party
Progressive change in this country has never come from above.
Policy bubbles up from the bottom. Decisions are made at the top.
Now technology gives you a chance to help organize. You don't have to wait for either the inefficiency or the corruption. You don't have to wait for government. You can actually self-organize and build institutions bottom up.
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.
People have the most control over their affairs at the grass-roots level. Anything that can be fairly and efficiently handled at a grass-roots level should be thus handled, and only delegated to a higher authority when necessary.
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.
There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.
We believe that leaders should be following the masses. We only ran in leadership campaigns to get our ideas across, to use it as a platform.
Real change never occurs from the top on down, [but] always from the bottom on up.
Democracy must be internally generated. You cannot force it from the top - it's not going to work.
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.
Through Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana, we want to give impetus to Demand driven development model instead of Supply driven development model. Let the villages say what has to be done, and what not.
These powerless people at the bottom are the ones with whom we must begin. They must have the insight and the knowledge to work together and recognise that they are on the right track.
America is a bottom-up society, where new trends and ideas begin in cities and local communities...My colleagues and I have studied this great country by reading its newspapers. We have discovered that trends are generated from the bottom up.
Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.
If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come the grass roots up, not from the top down.
I believe that change comes from the bottom, not the top.
These communities that are losing local news coverage are losing something deeper. They're losing a connection to American democracy. And those connections must be rebuilt. We need more of a bottom-up sense of what it means to produce news.
A nonviolent struggle necessarily involves construction on a small scale. It cannot therefore lead to tamas or darkness or inertia.
We tend to think of the mind of an organization residing in the CEO and the organization's top managers, perhaps with the help of outside consultants that they call in. But that is not really how an organization thinks.
If there is going to be change, real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That's how change happens.
