Collective Action Quotes

“There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. It is a phenomenon recorded again and against in the history of popular movements against injustice all over the world.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140

“Once the thunderstorm starts, raindrops can no longer vote.”
― Mike Klepper

“This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours.”
― Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

“A great many a drop of water will create a creek.”
― Giovanni Morassutti

“We were crushed’ said Judith; ‘for lack of resolution more than lack of numbers. A strike is nothing if a worker may pledge herself to it today and return to the factory
tomorrow. So we gather here; tonight, to unite and entwine our fate.”
― C.S. Malerich, The Factory Witches of Lowell

“If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing. In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn't mean that they're meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make. During the Protestant Reformation, when "end times" was merely an idea, not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they're good--because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet, and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that it will save me.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“They say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“Women live their lives trying to create bodies of deference. And anger is not compatible with deference... In the "cosmetic panopticon," expressing anger is disobedient and rebellious, powerful and threatening, because it is the seed of aggression and collective action.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“[Feminist] movement had given the culture the phrase “the personal is political,” credited to this passage from Carol Hanisch: “Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.” It was an important and fruitful idea in February 1969. It helped people to see that things that happened in the quiet of personal life, and yet happened over and over again at the scale of the system, and happened because of forces that no individual was powerful enough to counteract alone—that these things had to be seen as and acted on politically, grandly, holistically, and, above all, in the places where the power was. A man beating a woman wasn’t just one man beating one woman; he was part of a system of male supremacy and laws and a culture of looking away that put the problem beyond solution by the woman in question. The shame one felt in getting an abortion wasn’t a feeling cooked up by the feeler; it was engineered and constructed through public policy and the artful use of religious authority. The feminists helped us to see problems in this way.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“There are so many things to be done, and progressive minds are overflowing with ideas and proposals. As we consider real-world actions, though, there's one thing worth remembering above all: the future can't be planned by a group of socialist intellectuals designing bullet-pointed lists of what's best for the rest of humanity. Democracy means that people make choices themselves, and good ideas emerge from healthy, collective deliberation... Personally, I'ld like to see a thriving culture of political discussions, where the cafes are full of people passionately hashing out their disagreements about What Must Be Done. Not everyone has to participate in political life, but everyone should at least feel like someone would listen to them if they came up with a solution to a problem.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist

“Within suffering, there is a message. Suffering tends to take us to a convergence of what is bearable and what is not—a do or die situation. We are now at that juncture where we are either going to do things very differently or face our demise. We’ve are reaching the final act of a species-wide experiment based on the deep premise of how to go about being humans together in relationship to the world.”
― Michael Ronin, Modern Masculinity for the Conscious Man: Making Sense in Troubled Times

“Little changes do not transform frameworks that are fundamentally unfair. The last few decades have enabled a record shift of money and power to a very few, but the remedy for inequality is what it has always been: collective action through the organised movement of working people. The trade union movement is the equalising, opposite force against the greed of the wealthy and privileged.
This is the reason why the wealthy and privileged are so relentless in their campaign to crush unionism.”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“[Imprisoned Poem]
Somewhere deep inside me
There lies an imprisoned poem
A poem that is
Buried
Chained
And holding its breath
Ages ago…
A poem about futility
The fragility of words
About alarms, if sounded,
They’d be either destined to silence
Or get written on the walls of indifference…
There is an ancient poem
Imprisoned in my soul
Waiting to be released impatiently,
In due time…
Like a house cat
this imprisoned poem keeps eagerly watching
Every move outside the window,
Without any participation…
And like a house cat,
Whenever this imprisoned poem
Gets exhausted by the triviality of reality,
It sleeps for long hours
Only to wake up and find
The status quo unchanged
And the strings moving the puppets uncut…
It then looks out the window in sorrow
And goes back to sleep once again
To dream of a less ugly world…
My imprisoned poem has vowed not to release itself
From the deepest points in my soul
Until everyone else is awake
For its release to be meaningful…

(November 17, 2014)”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“By going beyond solidarity, individualised lifestyle changes, I saw the incredible transformation that comes from building community power. By building this power, we can see that settling for just making better choices within a harmful system is not enough; it is only when we come together that we can transform the system itself.”
― Mikaela Loach, It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

“What the research is showing us is that the feeling of being in a collective is really an essential part of [social activism]. We have that famous quote from Bill McKibben when he's asked, what's the one thing I can do to solve this problem? What's one thing? And he says, stop being just I, stop just being you. Start to see yourself in this broader collective, start to plug in to a collective, because a collective actually has kind of the effects that are, the sum is greater than the parts. And I use the metaphor of the choir, right? When you're in a choir, and you're lots of people singing, and you need to catch your breath, or maybe you have a little frog in your throat or something, you can take a moment out and kind of settle your body again, get your voice back, knowing that the rest of the choir is carrying that song. Whereas if you feel like you're the only one singing, there's no space for that, right? And so you just keep singing, and you just sing through the suffering of it.”
― Sarah Jaquette Ray

“There's some really interesting research that shows that action towards climate change in fact doesn't address climate anxiety, it doesn't alleviate our sense of despair about climate change, that action in a collective is the essential thing. And so there's a sort of misnomer that happens. There's a misunderstanding that if we do some actions, we'll feel better. But in fact, it's the collective part that makes us feel better, and less so the action itself. And so the collective makes us feel efficacious, the collective has that social contagion factor of hope and joy and pleasure.”
― Sarah Jaquette Ray

“In reality, the way to topple a dictator is found within ourselves.”
― Heather Marsh, How to Dismantle a Dictatorship

“In the weave of class consciousness, each strained thread stitches resistance against the cloak of oppression.”
― Paulo Ricardo Zargolin

“I am just the person that is here. I have help from people of all ages from everywhere—and that is the only way we are going to find a solution to these problems.”
― Lawrence Nault, Fingerprints In The Water