Top 1200 Social Movements Quotes & Sayings

Social media can be very effective in creating movements. In the beginning, that is how I first got attention.

Even though I believe in mass social movements, I'm uncomfortable in crowds.

We're talking about the Communist Party, the Socialist worker's movement, those movements basically have been underlined. We have other movements, but they're not as powerful as the movements that we had then.

Feminism is a belief that although women and men are inherently of equal worth, most societies privilege men as a group. As a result, social movements are necessary to achieve political equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies.

History is the product of vast, amorphous and indecipherable social movements.

You build movements and keep people in a struggle when it feels productive. Anti-capitalists have typically been the people in movements who have declared every gain to be a trick of the capitalist class to buy us off. That line isn't very inspiring, and it shows no sensitivity to how social movements actually succeed.

Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.

The only continent where social movements have led to political parties that have pushed through serious social and political reforms is in South America.

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.

My movements, ma'am, are all leg movements. I don't do nothing with my body.

They're [social media] amazing tools to communicate information - especially about different causes or crises or movements.

Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.

Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even - or perhaps especially - in authoritarian regimes.

Fascist movements kill off their critics, literally or metaphorically, while democratic movements value, invite and even welcome criticism.

One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies.

Concerned consumers are realizing that they can use social media to organize themselves around shared values to start effective movements. Social media gives them a sounding board to share ideas, as well as a means to punish irresponsible corporate behaviors.

Change depends on people knowing the truth. Change depends on people speaking that truth out loud. That's what movements do. Movements educate people to the truth. They pass along information and ideas that many others do not know, and they cause them to ask questions, to challenge their own long-held beliefs. ... Movements are the way ordinary people get more freedom and justice. Movements are how we keep a check on power and those who abuse it.

Teenagers have a legitimate voice. We deserve to have a seat at the table and a place in the conversation. We're not exempt from politics and social movements; we're affected by them.

CrossFit is all about constantly-varied, high-intensity movements. And to do these movements, you have to have a certified coach to take you through this - or any type of physical activity.

Political and social history are in my view two aspects of the same process. Social life loses half its interest and political movements lose most of their meaning if they are considered separately.

Some people think that movements, such as the movements in ballet, are a higher cultural expression, whereas some are just dirt. I think it is elitist to think that a trained movement is more acceptable than untrained and possibly unrehearsed movements.

There are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of Al-Qaeda without the terrorism.

Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua have made a tremendous leap just by rejecting the neoliberal adjustment policies, they are making a statement from the social perspective. Capital in these cases has not been protected in any way which along with non - interference of the state is what neo liberalism stands for. It has gone the other way around; they have looked for social policies from the political movements and then when they have acquired the power of those political movements they have become in charge of the State.

What's more important is that we talk about movements; change happens through movements. The movement to end slavery, the movement to bring justice for those who have been left out of the system, movements to include women, movements around sexual preference - all these movements brought about change.

If we are going to talk about the most recent of the "Indignados" movements in several countries of the world, including Europe, those are social movements but eventually they will evolve into political movements. This will happen because the traditional bourgeois parties have lost credibility after being the main political influence in most countries of Latin-America and Europe in the last 50 or 60 years.

I recall coming across a line by the late Charles Tilly when he said, "The conditions for the possibility of social movements have been called into question in the twenty-first century." And I said to myself, my god, a society in history without social movements, for me, is very difficult to live in.

The real power of any movement is how we work together with other social justice movements.

Individual struggles merge into larger social movements.

The West sees liberation movements as terrorist movements, and that is why I am accused of supporting terrorism: because I support liberation movements.

... the movements of the body reveal the movements of the soul.

Power is global and politics is local. That must change. We need a new language for understanding new global power formations as well as new international modes of politics to fight them. Social movements must move outside of national boundaries and join with others across the globe to fight the savagery of neoliberal global politics and central to such a task is the work of intellectuals, artists, cultural workers, and others who can fashion new tools and social movements in the fight against the current anti-democratic threats being imposed all over the globe.

Storytelling may be what most distinguishes social movements from interest groups.

Music has always pushed ahead social movements and can do much more than just dumb down a populace.

I am, in general, favourable to activism and social movements and hostile to graft and corruption.

To all of the young people out there who are creating social change or even fomenting social movements: hold on to your idealism and your belief in your ability to change the world. Your lofty goals demand attention and deserve support.

The surrender of oneself to a stronger power, the unification of one's own movements with the movements of the whole is what makes dance religious and lets it become a service of God.

Angela Davis offers a cartography of engagement in oppositional social movements and unwavering commitment to justice.

Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.

The two great movements of our century -- towards Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community -- are summed up in Anarchist-Communism.

Social movements rarely succeed if they violate our gut sense of decency and moral proportion.

The Purusha should assume at all times the attitude of a giver of sanction while rejecting the lower movements and accepting only truth-movements.

People who are invested in feminist movements are going to be talking about it regardless. Because we have such powerful tools to disseminate information and share resources, especially via social media.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements.

When Paul [Greengrass] was writing, he'd send me story ideas that he had. He was particularly interested in social movements and revolutions that had been happening all over the world, and how computers and the internet had helped those movements. He encouraged me to read a book about Anonymous, the hacker group called "white hat" hackers, meaning they're driven by ideology and social disruption as opposed to just greed.

I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.

When you start to do research into gorillas or any kind of apes, if you're going to play them, that's one of the biggest misconceptions. And when I did Kong, you're not doing gorilla movements, you're not doing ape movements, you're looking for a personality. It's like saying okay I'm going to do human movements.

I think sex work gets over-mystified and overcomplicated because it's about sexuality, and women's sexuality in general. What strikes me when I look at sex worker organizations and sex worker movements, in the US especially, is that they're so in alignment with other longstanding progressive causes. If anything, sex workers have been at the forefront of some of these causes. There have always been sex workers at the forefront of social movements.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

The emotion is the execution of a very complex program of actions. Some actions that are actually movements, like movement that you can do, change your face for example, in fear, or movements that are internal, that happen in your heart or in your gut, and movements that are actually not muscular movements, but rather, releases of molecules.

Too often we forget that social and political movements don't happen overnight. They don't bring change immediately - you have to build a critical mass of understanding of the issues.

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

My family, my background... it just parallels really nicely with a lot of social and cultural movements.

The great thing about social movements is everybody gets to be a part of them.

It was clear to us that social movements and activism can only take us so far in our mission.

Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador lived through times of cruel and ruthless capitalism where the workers, the masses of the population, saw themselves living in a precarious state of employment and subsistence conditions. The impact of this reality took hold and impacted the evolution of the social situation of those countries and even though that produced movements that were not exactly political movements but social movements.

I've been involved in social activism my entire life, and I would argue that many people involved in social activist movements have done very little work on themselves.

Today women in many countries are taking part in various types of movements of protest, some of which are serious struggles for economic and social emancipation .

Until educators, individuals, artists, intellectuals and various social movements address how the metaphysics of casino capitalism, war and violence have taken hold on American society (and in other parts of the world) along with the savage social costs they have enacted, the forms of social, political, and economic violence that young people are protesting against, as well as the violence waged in response to their protests, will become impossible to recognize and act on.

Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.