Community Organizing Quotes

I remember reading [ Studs Terkel's] "Working" when it first came out and just finding that very powerful. I was going into community organizing. What stuck was to reveal the sacredness of ordinary people's lives. That everybody has a story. And I think Studs is terrific at drawing out that shimmering quality of people's everyday struggles.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

The thirteenth rule of radical tactics: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

It is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.

Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.

Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

All the eight years of [Barack] Obama when [George W.] Bush was asked repeatedly, "I don't do that. I had my time. It's his time now." The protocols and the history, the traditions say that past presidents don't comment. That didn't work for Bill Clinton. He couldn't help himself. Obama is not commenting, but Obama is actively engaged in the sabotage of the [Donald] Trump administration, with all of these community organizing uprisings.

I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing, and activities on the ground, that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power throughout which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways, we still suffer from that.

Placemaking is community organizing. It's a campaign.

Michelle and Barack [Obama] epitomize what my father set the stage for - they epitomize global community organizing. I'm a global child, I was raised a global child, and he's a global child.

What makes community organizing especially attractive is the faith it places in the ability of the poor to make decisions for themselves.

The rules in this new 'post-partisan' era are pretty simple: If the Democratic Party wants it, it's 'stimulus.' If the Republican Party opposes it, it's 'politics' - as in headlines like this: 'Obama Urges GOP To Keep Politics To A Minimum On Stimulus.' These are serious times: As the president says, it's the worst economic crisis since the Thirties. So politicians need to put politics behind them and immediately lavish $4.19 billion on his community-organizing pals at the highly inventive 'voter registration' group ACORN for 'neighborhood stabilization activities.

[Barack] Obama isn't pointing to anyone, and certainly doesn't like it when others note (correctly) that his influences were the likes of Saul Alinsky, the Chicagoan and modern founder of community organizing, or Frank Marshall Davis, the communist journalist and agitator from Chicago who mentored Obama in Hawaii in the latter 1970s, and who Obama warmly acknowledges in his memoirs.

Hopefully folks will look at the good things that I've done over the years, you know, my 10 years in Congress, my 12 years in state legislature, my many years of community organizing for the environment, for police accountability, for criminal justice reform, economic empowerment, trying to fight for small-business people, all these things.