America was not built by conformists, but by mutineers.

- Jim Hightower

A hungry people listens not to reason, nor cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers.

- Seneca

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

- Howard Zinn

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

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.

- Howard Zinn

The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.

- Cesar Chavez

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

- Audre Lorde

Take it easy -- but take it.

- Woody Guthrie

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

- Oscar Wilde

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

- Robert M. Hutchins

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

- George Orwell

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

- Abigail Adams

Last guys don't finish nice.

- Saul Alinsky

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

- Eleanor Roosevelt



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



Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.

- Eugene V. Debs



No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

- Barbara Ehrenreich



If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

- Henry David Thoreau



Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.

- Wendell Phillips



It is well known that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

- Hannah Arendt



Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

- Albert Camus



I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

- John Steinbeck



Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.

- Bernadette Devlin