Quotes & Sayings About Organizing

A great philosopher once said: 'We are what we Contemplate'
And in these modern times when mankind is constantly confronted with images of conflict and world disasters, it seems very important to contemplate the Beautiful.
It has become my personal crusade as an artist, to create images which uplift and nurture the human heart; to create that which serves as a reminder of what is Sacred and Beautiful within the drama of Life....
Ever since I can remember, my innermost nature has always been to do acts of kindness and to create, from saving lost animals, to organizing charitable events; from mothering my four children to now giving birth to the 'Art of Beauty'. — Ginger Gilmour

We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labor of love. It absorbed all our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard problem. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Telling the truth and being ethical often keeps people from political power, but doing the right thing, always, without exception, is all that matters in the long run, and is ultimately powerful. That's why the true heroes of the civil rights struggle were never politicians. They were humble folk on a mission, enduring sit-ins and organizing marches and debates. When they began to succeed, the politicians, seeing an opportunity, followed them. — Paul Theroux

In the ever accelerating world of the Internet, e-campaigning has gone from a novelty to a necessity in less than a year. With increasing sophistication and urgency, campaigns are using the Web as a bulletin board, advertising medium and organizing tool. — Howard Fineman

Developing and implementing IT governance design effectiveness and efficiency can be a multidirectional, interactive, iterative, and adaptive process. — Robert E. Davis

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history. — P. J. O'Rourke

We need to shift from an economic organizing principle for human civilization, to a humanitarian organizing principle. Making money more important than your own children is a pathological way for an individual to run their affairs, and it's a pathological way for a society to run its affairs. — Marianne Williamson

American [public] schools are failing because they are organized according to a bureaucratic, monopolistic model; their organizing principle is basically the same as that of a socialist economy. — David Boaz

Completing the circle is both philosophical and tactical - there is a growing sense of mastery that comes with practice, diligence, and experience. — Eric Mann

First organizing it on paper isn't just academic, it's an applied prerequisite for manifestation. — T.F. Hodge

In my thirties I was doing it, in my forties I was organizing it and now, unfortunately, I can only talk about it. — Cynthia Payne

The story, and the conviction it carries, are part of the teller's way of organizing his own life. — Tim Parks

The key to creating a successful system is to make it as uncomplicated as possible. — Geralin Thomas

The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies. — Huston Smith

Many have the idea that organizing people is very difficult, but it isn't. It becomes difficult only at the point where you begin to see other things that are easier. But if you are willing to give the time and make the sacrifice, it's not that difficult to organize. — Cesar Chavez

Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard. — Roger Scruton

He tried to get the Caddy to run some of the life-organizing protocols, but they were pretty useless without connectivity. — Charlie Jane Anders

Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you. — Stephen Covey

I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing. — Angela Davis

Food is one of the great organizing tools. — Pete Seeger

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. — Lorrie Moore

For the first time in history, a private company is organizing a mission to the moon. This mission will inspire countries of the world, citizens, our youth. — Eric C. Anderson

Woman was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage. As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage. — Angela Y. Davis

One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that people tend to think - even the activists - that instant gratification is required. You constantly hear: 'Look I went to a demonstration, and we didn't stop the war so what's the use of doing it again?' — Noam Chomsky

Males categorize their worlds by counting, naming, and organizing the objects they confront. Women, in addition to personalizing their topics, talk in a more dynamic way, focusing on how their topics change. Discussions of change require more verbs. — James W. Pennebaker

Until a radical change takes place and we wipe out all nationalities, all ideologies, all religious divisions, and establish a global relationship - psychologically first, inwardly before organizing the outer - we shall go on with wars. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Every homeowner deserves a Zen-like area to revitalize, rejuvenate and read. — Geralin Thomas

Imagine the National Guard being called against a group of peaceful people. How far can we get; how disgraceful can it become? It's the most disgraceful, the most wicked thing I've seen in all my years of organizing farm labor. — Cesar Chavez

The reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy. — Ron Eglash

Capt. Lewis is brave, prudent, habituated to the woods, and familiar with Indian manners and character," Jefferson told Benjamin Rush.95 Lewis asked William Clark, George Rogers Clark's brother, to join him in organizing what became known as the Corps of Volunteers for North West Discovery.96 Jefferson thought of America as an "empire of liberty." Now he would have a keener, more detailed grasp of the continent that stretched far beyond the nation's existing borders - and a chance at claiming that sprawling West. — Jon Meacham

I was very active in the Parks and Recreation department. I recall a lot of the things we had to do, from the trips for the department to organizing a Little League, those sorts of things. — Mike Scully

I'm not a person who believes in the great difference between women and men as editors. But I do think that quality is key. We're very good at organizing and discipline and patience, and patience is 50 per cent of editing. You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that. — Thelma Schoonmaker

If, in the final stage of disintegration, antisemitic slogans proved the most effective means of inspiring and organizing great masses of people for imperialist expansion and destruction of the old forms of government, then the previous history of the relationship between Jews and the state must contain elementary clues to the growing hostility between certain groups of society and the Jews. We — Hannah Arendt

There is no master cabal organizing the three-hundred plus Food Not Bombs or mad genius organizing the dozens of Indymedia's across the globe. We can all be the Johnny and Jane Appleseeds of anarchist counter-structure. We do this by harvesting good ideas and strategies from across the globe and replacing them on the local level. And while our passions and ideas should be brash, we should also be inspired by our day-to-day victories. People need to feel encouraged to start small, realizing the infrastructure begets infrastructure. — Curious George Brigade

men think that organizing parties of dozens of riders and hounds to chase down one poor fox is sporting." Louise snorted. "Men's opinions are irrelevant. — Julie Berry

The Law of Divine Compensation posits that this is a self-organizing and self-correcting universe: the embryo becomes a baby, the bud becomes a blossom, the acorn becomes an oak tree. Clearly, there is some invisible force that is moving every aspect of reality to its next best expression. — Marianne Williamson

While it is not likely that Democrats will start winning statewide elections tomorrow in Alabama, South Carolina, Kansas, Wyoming, or Utah, they will never win if they don't plant a flag and start organizing. My own state of Vermont is a good example. Forty-five years ago, Vermont was one of the most Republican states in the country. Today, as a result of a lot of hard work by many people, it is one of the most progressive. It — Bernie Sanders

This is why I like Diakopoulos' approach of using technology to answer a need. He identifies four news consumers needs: 1. staying informed; 2. gaining personal identity (through, for example, reinforcing one's values); 3. integrating and interacting socially (finding the basis for conversation); and 4. being entertained. He next defines 10 key journalistic functions: 1. truth 2. independence 3. impartiality 4. public interest 5. watchdogging 6. organizing forums 7. informing 8. storytelling 9. aggregating 10. sensemaking — Jeff Jarvis

To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us vulnerable because it is so obviously about wanting something beyond what is, and to have a political desire often is construed as wanting too much. — Deborah B. Gould

In every moment, we make a choice about which direction we are going to go. Once we realize that this is a self-correcting and self-organizing universe, then we don't have to look any further than our own life circumstances, the relationships and situations that we are in, to begin the transformation. — Marianne Williamson

Obviously, the final goal of scientists and mathematicians is not simply the accumulation of facts and lists of formulas, but rather they seek to understand the patterns, organizing principles, and relationships between these facts to form theorems and entirely new branches of human thought. For me, mathematics cultivates a perpetual state of wonder about the nature of mind, the limits of thoughts, and our place in this vast cosmos. — Clifford A. Pickover

A phone tree isn't an ancient form of political organizing, but you have to call every person. — Howard Rheingold

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

You would renounce organizing your future. You would let yourself be guided by the randomness of encounters and events, indifferent to one choice over another. — Edouard Leve

Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded. — Richard Dawkins

Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions. — Jean Baudrillard

While the government is "studying" and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work ...
A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.
(pg.87, "Think Little") — Wendell Berry

We can most easily fulfill our desires when our actions are motivated by love. We expand the least effort, and we offer no resistance. We tap into the infinite organizing power of the universe to do less and accomplish everything. — Deepak Chopra

We've organized ourselves as cultures, to a large degree, around what we agree we know. And when you have multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of organizing, the society loses one of its deepest organizational principles. — David Weinberger

Genghis Khan's ability to manipulate people and technology represented the experienced knowledge of more than four decades of nearly constant warfare. At no single, crucial moment in his life did he suddenly acquire his genius at warfare, his ability to inspire the loyalty of his followers, or his unprecedented skill for organizing on a global scale. These derived not from epiphanic enlightenment or formal schooling but from a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning, experimental adaptation, and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined mind and focused will. His fighting career began long before most of his warriors at Bukhara had been born, and in every battle he learned something new. In every skirmish, he acquired more followers and additional fighting techniques. In each struggle, he combined the new ideas into a constantly changing set of military tactics, strategies, and weapons. He never fought the same war twice. — Jack Weatherford

I always wondered if there was a purpose to the universe, if there was a plan, if there was some sort of organizing factor, hopefully that I played a role in. — John Green

I like organizing things. I like organizing my closets, so that I know where everything is. And and I used to color code it. — Taylor Swift

Whether serving in the military, building industry, organizing politically, or making their way in any other part of American culture, the Irish were determined to create a free and prosperous life for themselves. This Irish-American struggle led to social and political progress for all Americans. — Rashers Tierney

I'm an inveterate note taker - I scribble all these things down on pieces of paper. I wanted to create some way of organizing all of them. — Mitch Kapor

...we have to be aware of the power and importance of organizing not just around identity, but the materiality of daily life, which still, in many respects, is racialized for people of color. You build from that, but you have a grander social vision that transcends it and recognizes the strengths and limitations that are drawn from the particularity of identity. — Manning Marable

Classification, broadly defined, is the process of organizing knowledge into some systematic order. It has been considered the most fundamental activity of the human mind. — Lois Mai Chan

The main goal of organizing people is to make them laborers. — Sunday Adelaja

I've had a lot of experience building things, organizing things, a national scholarship program. — Benjamin Carson

Let me ask you: Who do you prefer, a clown organizing your menu - with all due respect to Mr. McDonald - or a chef? I do believe it's a very simple answer. — Jose Andres

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament. — Vivian Gornick

Religion as a whole specializes in sin management. It's all about organizing humanity in such a way that we cause as little damage as possible. — Erwin McManus

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self. — David Brooks

We live in a self-organizing and self-correcting universe. For every problem, there is a potentially miraculous solution. A closed heart deflects the miracle, while an open heart brings it forth ... In every moment, we make a choice between the heavenly awareness of our connection to all living things, or the hell of the delusion that we are separate and alone. The mind will manufacture according to our choice; whichever we choose, we will seem to experience. — Marianne Williamson

Physically, the heart is an organ that keeps us alive through a coordinated network of cells beating together. Spiritually, the heart is the center of love, the force that makes our lives worthwhile. Globally, the heart is a symbol of a new organizing principle for how to live together on this finite jewel of a planet. — Anodea Judith

Forget physics, forget organic chem, forget reading James Joyce's Ulysses - organizing your time is one of the biggest challenges you'll face in your academic career. — Stefanie Weisman

ACORN is organizing to make sure the job of rebuilding New Orleans is done by the people of New Orleans and truly benefits the communities who have been hurt the most. — Roseanne Barr

Today we are united, strong and on the move. Today we have a strong strike fund. Today we have the resources to run large-scale organizing campaigns against global employers. Today we have $100 million in the bank. — James P. Hoffa

If one asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him: It means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happiness, meant. Our flag carries American ideas, American history and American feelings. This American flag was the safeguard of liberty. It was an ordinance of liberty by the people, for the people. That it meant, that it means, and, by the blessing of God, that it shall mean to the end of time! — Henry Ward Beecher

Today, it is clear that Internet organizing is vital to our future success. — Martin Frost

Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species. — Aldous Huxley

There can be no one best way of organizing a business. — Joanne Woodward

Self-organizing teams form the core of APM. They blend freedom and responsibility, flexibility and structure. In the face of inconsistency and ambiguity, the teams strive to consistently deliver on the product vision within the project constraints. Accomplishing this requires teams with a self-organizing structure and self-disciplined individual team members. Building this kind of team is the core of an agile project leader's job. — Jim Highsmith

Antiracism is not "my" campaign. I have been doing antiracism organizing, activism, educating and writing for 20 years, in one form or another, but it's not a personal crusade. My work is part of a larger tradition, and larger effort, involving mostly people of color, and of course some white allies as well. — Tim Wise

Because of my intense hopes for the youth of China, I feel very keenly my responsibility for their future success or failure. The fate of China lies in their hands. The responsibility for organizing and training them to become worthy citizens of China, able to undertake the tasks of Resistance and Reconstruction, is mine; I cannot evade it. — Chiang Kai-shek

What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility. — Aleksandar Hemon

I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs. — James Howard Kunstler

We'll organize workers in this movement as long as we're willing to sacrifice. The moment we stop sacrificing, we stop organizing. — Cesar Chavez

Today, for the first time - and the Obama campaign showed us this - we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one. — Carlo Ratti

The subordinated group has inadequate redress through existing political institutions, and is deterred thereby from organizing into conventional political struggle and opposition. — Kate Millett

This habit starts awfully early. Social psychologist Marilynn Brewer, who has been studying the nature of stereotypes for many years, once reported that her daughter returned from kindergarten complaining that "boys are crybabies."25 The child's evidence was that she had seen two boys crying on their first day away from home. Brewer, ever the scientist, asked whether there hadn't also been little girls who cried. "Oh yes," said her daughter. "But only some girls cry. I didn't cry." Brewer's little girl was already dividing the world, as everyone does, into us and them. Us is the most fundamental social category in the brain's organizing system, and it's hardwired. — Carol Tavris

There is more power in starting your story from a little concept that we call the Organizing Idea, an idea that is an active expression meant to inspire experiences, not a brand statement. — Gaston Legorburu

There is more joy to be found in owning less than can ever be found in organizing more. — Joshua Becker

The market is like the police: of course you need it, but if it becomes the central organizing principle of your culture then you're in deep trouble. — Philip E. Agre

It's no use organizing the mice if the cat doesn't agree. — Marty Rubin

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism. — Gloria Steinem

It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling. — Jonas Salk

The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding ... The 'image-idea' drives away the idea. — Siegfried Kracauer

In recent years we have become much more preoccupied with streamlining and organizing our subject than with maintaining its overall vitality. If we are not careful, a great adventure of the mind will become yet another profession. — Mark Kac

I describe myself as someone who was always putting on a show, even when I was a little girl. I wanted to be an actress but I liked organizing everybody and putting on plays. I was a producer. — Laura Ziskin

When we start organizing, we tend to put tactics before reason. We see a messy space and launch a wild, full frontal assault before we understand the background of the problem and equip ourselves to meet the challenge. This is like going into battle unarmed without knowing our enemy! — Vicki Norris

Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty. — H.G.Wells

But when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone's disbelief - at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Beehive State. The girls went big for vertical hair-dos, pure monuments to shellac. — Norman Mailer

I think of the universe as the body of God, and the creative capability we see and can exhibit as the mind of God. I will use this phrase to describe our system, that it's a creative, intelligent, self-organizing, learning trial-and-error, interactive, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system. — Edgar Mitchell

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world. — Daniel J. Levitin

When I'm talking to people, I find myself quoting the three organizing rules of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter was initiated by three young women, and too few people know that. But, anyway, the first one is lead with love. The second is low ego, high impact. The third is move with the speed of trust. I must say those make me feel very hopeful for the future. — Gloria Steinem

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back. — Bill Gates

When she was older, after ten or so, she could tell she was being useful, but as a small child she was tolerated (only just, she knew) by this whirlwind of efficiency that was her mother organizing a party. Still she insisted on arranging fruit on a dish, or disposing ashtrays around the house, while her mother reduced her pace to Alice's. At least while "helping," Alice did not feel quite so much as if she were a tiny creature on top of a great wave, frantically and hopelessly signalling to her mother, who stood indifferently on the shore, not noticing her. — Doris Lessing

Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights. — Rebecca MacKinnon

Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiphany. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. (p. 130) — Nancy Fichtman Dana

Julia supposed that there was also a difference in perspective: 'The practical level was another level down [in 1960s social movements] and not so interesting. I don't know much about organizing, but I feel as though, if the reality of the situation doesn't change people's heads, then nothing's going to change their heads. Marches and those things are not the work of it. The work of it is whatever the work is. — Laura Kaplan