Quotes & Sayings About Grassroots

During the summer of 2009, conservative activists turned up the heat on Democratic politicians to protest the innovation-destroying, liberty-usurping Obamacare mandate. In the summer of 2012, it's squishy Republican politicians who deserve the grassroots flames. — Michelle Malkin

Raw. Unleashed. Unashamed of following Christ's commands, His voice in my ear. — Margaret Aranda

Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love being a part of something that is grassroots, and you can see the actual changes, the effect of what people do. — Anthony Edwards

I think the Occupy movement is absolutely fantastic; in my opinion, it's probably one of the most important people's movements of the 21st century and the 20th century. The trouble is that nobody really wants to support what they represent. They are too 'grassroots' for their own good. — David Lloyd

Well you know I'm very supportive of what the Tea Party is trying to do. They're very concerned with spending, the deficit, the bailouts, you know all of those kinds of things. But I really think that the strength of the Tea Party is being a grassroots movement. — John Boozman

My view on politics is much more grassroots oriented; it's not old boy network oriented, so I tend to, you know, come at it a little bit stronger, a little bit more street-wise, if you will. That's rubbed some feathers the wrong way. — Michael Steele

We need a grassroots movement and government policies and programs to change the food landscape and the built environment to give our children a chance to have happy, healthy successful lives. — Mark Hyman

To succeed, this movement will have to change our ideals in fundamental ways. It will have to kill off the traditional American dream, the idea of constant striving for a better future, symbolized by the middle-class goal of a rising income and the purchase of a little house with a yard - not to mention the freedom to move where you please, run your life, and govern your town with your neighbors when you get there. Greg Galluzzo, Obama's mentor and the man who created the grassroots crusade that inspired Building One America, dismisses the American dream as a sham. What really makes Americans move to the suburbs, says Galluzzo, is 'racism and greed. — Stanley Kurtz

Rwanda is a very open and free country. Key to our recovery as a nation has a range of grassroots, citizen-centered polices we call "homegrown solutions." The idea that Rwanda is highly controlled from the center belies the reality, which is that citizens in every village have a powerful say in how things get done. We prize accountability and Rwandans are quickly adapting themselves to the possibilities of a digital economy. — Paul Kagame

crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn't do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programs and summer jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn't discriminate. My — Trevor Noah

The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents. — Rebecca MacKinnon

On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp. — Gabriel Marcel

We are a grassroots party. We always have been. That's been the strength of the GOP. — Michael Steele

There's enormous progressive activism and, more often than not, success at the grassroots level - everything from living wage campaigns to efforts to finance our elections are having terrific success. — Jim Hightower

I mean, people who say that the Tea Party isn't a grassroots movement, I think, are incorrect. I think in some respects, it is a grassroots movement. — Matt Taibbi

Grassroots techies - the mostly unknown people who write code and start companies that don't make the headlines - hate, loathe, and despise Microsoft. At technology conferences, it is the devil, or the guaranteed laugh line. Its products are mocked, its business practices booed. — Virginia Postrel

If we're going to be successful in taking on the billionaire class, we need a strong national grassroots movement. — Hillary Clinton

Hadn't been able to avoid hearing about the Tea Party, a recrudescence of the far right sooner than I would've hoped. Depending on whom you ask, the Tea Party formed either as a spontaneous grassroots protest against the government's massive interventions in the economy after the financial collapse of 2008, an hysterical backlash against our first black president, or just a hasty rebranding of the Republican Party now that the name Republican had taken on the same stigma as the Pinto, DC-10, and other products that reliably self-destruct. Their platform was the usual Republican wish list - cut taxes, gut the government, repeal the last century and revoke the social contract - and happened to coincide with the financial interests of their billionaire backers. They were widely regarded, on the left,* as dingbats. But today I was going to resist the impulse to sneer and feel superior and instead try, for once, to listen. — Tim Kreider

For the most part our grassroots members are serious, nice, tolerant people. — Francis Maude

Trans activism in the US has most frequently been grassroots, centered on poverty and criminalization, and often oppositional to the exclusionary "mainstreaming" threads in gay and lesbian politics and feminist politics. — Dean Spade

Do an overwhelming number of respected scientists believe that human actions are changing the Earth's climate? Yes. OK, that being the case, let's undermine that by finding and funding those few contrarians who believe otherwise. Promote their message widely and it will accumulate in the mental environment, just as toxic mercury accumulates in a biological ecosystem. Once enough of the toxin has been dispersed, the balance of public understanding will shift. Fund a low level campaign to suggest any threat to the car is an attack on personal freedoms. Create a "grassroots" group to defend the right to drive. Portray anticar activists as prudes who long for the days of the horse and buggy. Then sit back, watch the infotoxins spread - and get ready to sell bigger, better cars for years to come. — Kalle Lasn

Washington is a bubble, and there is nothing more powerful than the conservative grassroots when we are engaged and letting our voice be heard. — Ted Cruz

I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime - working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating. — Gloria Steinem

The climate crisis requires a bottom-up, grassroots demand for solutions because the elites in many parts of the world are under the influence of old industry. — Al Gore

I've learned the importance of changing people's minds at the grassroots level so that whoever does run will have a much better chance of encountering public opinion that reaches a critical mass and brings about a change not only in White House policies but in the Congress and in the state legislatures and all around the world. — Al Gore

I'd rather work with a grassroots organization than in politics. I'm not sure I'd be the best politician because I don't think I'm good about tactfully tiptoeing around questions in the right way. — Lauren Mayberry

Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War. — Breyten Breytenbach

I'm not a grassroots organizer; that is clear. I believe in a division of labor. I'm not trained to organize the grassroots, and grassroots has to come from the grassroots. — Mohamed ElBaradei

Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn't the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little. — Nicholas D. Kristof

I mean, people need to remember without the grassroots, Ronald Reagan probably doesn't become president of the United States of America and he worked the grassroots on a regular basis during his political career and especially between the years of 1976 and 1980 after the loss in Kansas City. — Michael Reagan

There is a general decline of taste for classical dance,ce, which is neglected and this must be developed from the grassroots. There is so much of razzle-dazzle ... that classical dance suffers. — Kanak Rele

For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market. — Ethan Zuckerman

I try not to make social consciousness a massive part of my music or comedy because I prefer to be an entertainer first and foremost, then do actual grassroots work when I can. — Doc Brown

The environmental movement could do a better job incorporating the message about the connection between poverty and environmental degradation, and building that message at the grassroots level. — Helene D. Gayle

When you're a 20-something grassroots activist, and you're deciding how to spend your time and money to make a difference, it makes a lot of sense to cause a million in damage with just $100 of investment. That's a better return than any other form of activism I've been involved in. — Rod Coronado

I don't see why, if you look at how the Australian culture and psyche is, that we can't be amongst the most generous, from the grassroots up, nations in the world. — Andrew Forrest

There are great amateur bodies that have good programs right from the grassroots level to professionals. — Karrie Webb

Politics of Friendship is, in other words, only a book between covers. For the real text, you must enter the classroom, put yourself to school, as a preview of the formation of collectivities. A single "teacher's" "students," flung out into the world and time, is, incidentally, a real-world example of the precarious continuity of a Marxism "to come," aligned with grassroots counterglobalizing activism in the global South today, with little resemblance to those varieties of "Little Britain" leftism that can take on board the binary opposition of identity politics and humanism, shifting gears as the occasion requires. — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Our commitment to coaches will be realized via TeamCarew, a grassroots marketing program that will provide them with insight and tools to teach the art and science of hitting. — Rod Carew

The times do not call for grassroots political activism, as if the next election might be enough to reverse a massive cultural earthquake. They do not call for working just a little bit harder: a few more speeches, another letter to the editor, another fundraiser, the next vote, the next committee meeting. These noble efforts aren't even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; they are tending the seaweed on its watery grave.
The times call for a new generation of book hunters. Like the book hunters of the Middle Ages, the new book hunters take it as their mission to uncover and salvage the best of what came before: to cherish it; hold it up for praise and emulation; study it; above all, to love it and pass it on. — Paul D. Miller

Pretending that the locals ran the Western NGOs was a way to entice donors, grassroots was no longer a true goal but a buzzword. Sadly, the goal was not to empower true local leadership, but to find token locals to be token champions with no real decision-making power...
But I always knew true, long-term change cannot happen without involving the community. — Kennedy Odede

I think we're not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments. — Grace Lee Boggs

I was previously involved in local and state politics, but not national, because grassroots democracy starts at the bottom. This was the breaking point for me, though - and it made the case that in order to fight locally, we have to fight nationally; we can't afford to neglect any area of life in this democracy. — Jill Stein

After the Second World War, capitalism underwent an enormous transformation, creating broad new social issues with extraordinary rapidity, issues that went beyond traditional proletarian demands for improved wages, hours, and working conditions: notably, environmental, gender, hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues. Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its threats to humanity, particularly with climatic changes that may alter the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutions of a global scope, and rampant urbanization that radically corrodes the civic life basic to grassroots politics. — Murray Bookchin

The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free. — John W. Gardner

...the Party always makes you spend a bit of time getting to know people on the ground before you leave them behind, so if you do well enough to stand for election you can claim to have grassroots support. — Jeremy Tiang

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. — Maajid Nawaz

We're the end of the baby boomers, and we participated in many social changes. Who would of thought, for example, when the AIDS epidemic came along that so many would die, because it was gay people dying. And what emerged was a grassroots movement that developed, and succeeded in getting things done. The pinpointing of that movement evolved into the changes that we have today. — Todd Haynes

It was truly an astonishing grassroots explosion, ... The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy. — Gaylord Nelson

Women need to be empowered through the strongest tool - education. They don't need to be subservient to anyone, but at the same time, men must change their mindset towards women. If they are more respectful towards them, then things will change at the grassroots level. It will happen slowly, but everyone has to move together. — Madhuri Dixit

About 70 percent of the district was new. It was a short amount of time to get to know hundreds and thousands of people. But with the help and support of old friends, we built a grassroots operation organically from the ground up. — Adam Kinzinger

Despite my deep unease about animal advocates working for things we don't want and asking for changes we don't believe in, I am not an "abolitionist." First, the abolition of animal slavery will no more end speciesism by itself than the abolition of American slavery ended racism. To change the world, I think we should aim higher. Second, I'm increasingly convinced that no matter who uses the term, it hides a slur. When used to refer to others, it connotes zealotry and obstructionism, and when taken as self-definition, it is seen as an attack by anyone who does not apply it to herself. Yes, it's a highly defensible moral philosophy, right up there with Peter Singer's application of Utilitarianism to animal liberation, and Tom Regan's Theory of Rights, but like those other intellectual concepts, it's useful only so far as it engenders right action. — Sarahjane Blum

You're really earning the support of New Hampshire voters, and you've got to do that one-on-one grassroots campaigning here, even if you have the most money. — Kelly Ayotte

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. — Tom Peters

I can't say I'm surprised: the grassroots antiwar movement keeps turning out to be MoveOn/A.N.S.W.E.R. astroturf. — Glenn Reynolds

I built a steel plant from the grassroots, so I learned all the nuts and bolts. When there was a problem, I would be able to guide them, though I am not a technical person. — Lakshmi Mittal

The fundamental weakness in the Tea Party machine is the stark difference between what the leaders of the Tea Party elite - plutocrats like the Koch Brothers -want and what the average grassroots Tea Party follower wants. — Chuck Schumer

We want to create, never mind the leaders or the bishops or chief rabbis or imams, or Popes. We want to create a grassroots movement where people will become attuned to uncompassionate discourse in the same way as we are now attuned to sort of gender imbalance in our speech. — Karen Armstrong

If we are to build grassroots respect for the institutions and processes that constitute democracy, the state must treat its citizens as real citizens rather than as subjects. — Mo Ibrahim

There are three critical ingredients to democratic renewal and progressive change in America: good public policy, grassroots organizing and electoral politics. — Paul Wellstone

I work with Kick G.A.M.E., the grassroots artist movement. Not to tell people we have the best union plan in the world, but to show people that if some activists, if some revolutionaries, if some street organizers from the hood can come together and put together a preliminary program to give health care to independent artists. — Immortal Technique

The whole reason we organize grassroots is, we think any politician that gets elected needs to be held accountable 365 days a year. — Chris Matthews

Spontaneous combustion of grassroots politics is the future. — Dick Morris

I think if progressives stay at this, continue at the grassroots level to make the case that all Americans should have choice, all Americans ought to be able to hold insurance companies accountable, I think we will have 60 votes in the United States Senate for a strong bill. — Ron Wyden

Even though mother's issues are not front page news, they touch us all personally, some more than others, and I believe passionately in the power of grassroots engagement. — Joan Blades

If you want a world ruled by law and not by force you must build up, from the very grassroots, a respect for law. — Eleanor Roosevelt

A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, "My story matters because I matter." A movement where we can take to the streets with our messy, imperfect, wild, stretch-marked, wonderful, heartbreaking, grace-filled, and joyful lives. A movement fueled by the freedom that comes when we stop pretending that everything is okay when it isn't. A call that rises up from our bellies when we find the courage to celebrate those intensely joyful moments even though we've convinced ourselves that savoring happiness is inviting disaster. Revolution — Brene Brown

In the mid-1980s, there was a grassroots desire for American culture. Maybe it was not a definite harbinger to what was to come in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it certainly gave a heads up to the global merging of the retail culture. — Brian Shactman

I didn't have big movie offers, or any big agents wanting to work with me. I had to go grassroots, start at the bottom and go on 150 auditions before someone finally gave me a shot. — Donnie Wahlberg

This is one way that wealthy Americans could really contribute. They could put hundreds of millions of dollars into the infrastructure bank, be a good investment for them, for their children, for their grandchildren, and they would directly contribute to revitalizing a big sector of middle-class wages in America and making our country more productive, so that we could create more opportunity. But I think that we could get a lot of grassroots support from, like, local chambers of commerce and other things if they understood exactly how this infrastructure bank would work. — William J. Clinton

This goes out to freedom fighters, graffiti writers, innocent lifers, grassroots organizers — Talib Kweli

[Fighting Climate Change] is important for every single person on the planet, which is why it has to be the greatest grassroots movement of all time. This is the battle of our lives. We're fighting for our children. — Emma Thompson

But even at the height of these scandals, even at the time when our finances were at their worst, the NAACP branches - the grassroots - kept plugging away. They kept doing what they do, and they do it well. — Julian Bond

Let's face it. There is no setup in Pakistan to train and groom young players at the grassroots level in different sports. Those of us who did make a name for ourselves and became champions did it with our own initiative - there was no academy to back us till we reached a certain level on our own. — Jahangir Khan

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. — Maajid Nawaz

I define democracy as control by the people. Slaves are those who allow others to control their lives. Insofar as people succeed in solving their problems fairly and efficiently at a grassroots level, they retain control over their lives. Insofar as they delegate their problem solving to a higher authority, they lose control over their lives. — Peace Pilgrim

I think Detroit is starting to get it. We consider it a victory for the grassroots, CalCars, and the Internet-led effort. — Felix Kramer

The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing. — Derrick Jensen

Grassroots efforts are real.
Grass cannot grow if someone is standing on it.
Where are you standing? — Bob Kulhan

A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers - and the grassroots influencers tweeting along - can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom. — Naomi Wolf

I'm asked that a lot: 'James, is there really a continuing spiritual renaissance occurring on this planet? Look at all the conflict, look at the wars.' And I believe, yes, we're still moving toward a deeper spirituality. It's personal. It's grassroots. It's everybody trying to get their own connection made, and from there it grows out. — James Redfield

I know within my organization, within the grassroots of my organization of the Tea Party movement generally, there's going to be a big drive for impeaching Obama. I don't know if that's the right move ... We need to play our cards very carefully and beware of the mouse trap that Obama might be trying to set for us. — Niger Innis

The best education I received was working with people in the community on a grassroots basis. Because what it taught me was that ordinary people, when they are working together can do extraordinary things. — Barack Obama

The Republicans need to work on registration and getting out their vote and their early voters and absentees. Grassroots stuff. — Rush Limbaugh

We need to reshape the movement as one of grassroots activists, and not 'professional activists' who populate the seemingly endless number of national animal rights groups. For many people, activism has become writing a check to a national group that is very pleased to have you leave it to them. Although it is important to give financial support to worthy efforts only, giving money is not enough and giving to the wrong groups can actually do more harm than good. — Gary L. Francione

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry. — Natasha Trethewey

If I could have chosen a flag back then, it would have been embroidered with a portrait of Malcolm X, dressed in a business suit, his tie dangling, one hand parting a window shade, the other holding a rifle. The portrait communicated everything I wanted to be - controlled, intelligent, and beyond the fear. I would buy tapes of Malcolm's speeches - "Message to the Grassroots," "The Ballot or the Bullet" - down at Everyone's Place, a black bookstore on North Avenue, and play them on my Walkman. Here was all the angst I felt before the heroes of February, distilled and quotable. "Don't give up your life, preserve your life," he would say. "And if you got to give it up, make it even-steven." This was not boasting - it was a declaration of equality rooted not in better angels or the intangible spirit but in the sanctity of the black body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Earth's immune system - its rapid response team of self-protection - becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwelling of grassroots work aimed at finding a sustainable future. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

My answer to those who oppose my appointment as CEO is that this is really a decision of the YWCA. They want to strengthen their grassroots to advocate on behalf of women's and children's empowerment and ending racism. — Patricia Ireland

Technology and the Internet are not just changing politics here in the U.S. It's also happening abroad. In the Philippines, where I grew up, grassroots organizers used text messaging to help overthrow a president. — Jose Antonio Vargas

I had this epiphany that I like the interaction with people. I wanted to make things happen at a grassroots level. — Diane Paulus

Punk rock really came out of N.Y. as a philosophy before the groups were ever recorded. I had a kind-of intellectual interest in the idea of creating a new scene that could be a grassroots thing. — Greg Ginn

All change starts with a distant rumble at the grassroots level. — Tom Coburn

We need to be wise consumers of information in an age of artificially created reality, written by professional propagandists, bought and paid for by special interests who many times disguise themselves as grassroots movements but are nothing but AstroTurf. They'll give you turf burns and turf toe, but never the truth. — H.L. Wegley

I join with Governor Rick Snyder and thousands of grassroots supporters and activists from across the state of Michigan in asking you all to please help me in supporting Pete Hoekstra, who I am proud to endorse. He will be our next United States senator. — Candice S. Miller

I'm more of a hands-on person. I like working with young people from the standpoint of providing support for the grassroots programs. State, national and Olympic champions begin at a grassroots level. — Jackie Joyner-Kersee

I am being lured back to the way of Jesus. I am finding it - sorry for this - spiritual. I'd kind of forgotten how compelling the Spirit is. He is the fresh wind everyone is looking for. He reminds me I am a member of a grand assembly that inspires and stirs and empowers. On bad days, when I secretly whisper, "Is this all there is?" the Spirit urges me to join Him at the bottom, where the best grassroots movements have always begun. — Jen Hatmaker

We are the great grassroots campaign of the modern era, built from mousepads, shoe leather and hope. — Howard Dean

The Sister Fund supports spiritual women and their organizations, both grassroots activists for justice, and national and international social change agents. — Helen LaKelly Hunt