That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.

- Henry Ward Beecher

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the atomic age -- as in being able to remake ourselves.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.

- John F. Kennedy

Truth never damages a cause that is just.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

My satisfaction comes from my commitment to advancing a better world.

- Faye Wattleton

You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.

- Marie Curie

One of the most powerful, and deeply spiritual, ways to work for social change is for us to take action in the present that embodies -- right now! -- the future vision that we seek

- Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow

I'm not afraid to shake up the system, and government needs more shaking up than any other system I know.

- Ann Richards

I think that the question of how power can be exerted from the lower reaches has never been more important. It will ultimately determine whether another world is indeed possible

- Frances Fox Piven

In spite of oppressors, in spite of false leaders, in spite of labor's own lack of understanding of its needs, the cause of the worker continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, giving him leisure to read and to think. Slowly his standard of living rises to include some of the good and beautiful things of the world. Slowly the cause of his children becomes the cause of all. His boy is taken from the breaker, his girl from the mill. Slowly those who create the wealth of the world are permitted to share it. The future is in labor's strong, rough hands.

- Mother Jones

At every turn when there has been an imbalance of power, the truth questioned, or our beliefs and values distorted, the change required to restore our nation has always come from the bottom up from our people.

- Howard Dean

All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

- Logan Pearsall Smith

To the wrongs that need resistance,
To the right that needs assistance,
To the future in the distance,
Give yourselves.

- Carrie Chapman Catt

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

- Mark Twain

I am not predicting the dawn of global democracy or global socialism. What I am predicting is an era of turmoil and uncertainty. Moreover, like all forms of power, interdependent power has a dark side, and it has always had a dark side. The hungry and diseased mobs who terrified the burghers of late-medieval Europe were not enlightenment thinkers, nor are the suicide bombers thrust forward by a resurgent Islam. Even the struggles of the Western Federation of Miners had a dark side, as they fought state and company violence with their own violence. Still, the defiant movements from the bottom that are fueled by interdependent power hold at least the hope that the needs and dreams of the great masses of the planet's people will make their imprint on the new societies for which we wish. Of course, the process of reform will be complicated and the outcomes shaped not only by interdependent power, but also by the complex institutional structures we inherit, cultural memory, and the concentrated power resources of aggrandizing elites. All that said, without the tempering influence of movements from below and the interdependent power they wield, our future is ominous.

- Frances Fox Piven

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

- Howard Zinn



Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

- John F. Kennedy



I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work. Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life.

- Bill Clinton



Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.

- Anna Quindlen



A reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.

- James Walker



A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the sound of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

- Jawaharlal Nehru



Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge



When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

- Eleanor Roosevelt



That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

- Michael Harrington



If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it You just do it one step at a time.

- Marian Wright Edelman



Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

- Frederick Douglass



Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

- Susan B. Anthony



Don't agonize. Organize.

- Florynce Kennedy