Organizing Quotes

“We are all a little schizophrenic. Each of us has three different people living inside us every day—who you were, who you are and who you will become. The road to sanity is to recognize those identities, in order to know who you are today.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture.”
― Tim Wise, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity

“Since I had the inclinatation and the training, helping people came naturally. I wasn't thinking in terms of organizing members, but just a duty that I had to do. That goes back to my mother's training. It was not until later that I realized that this was a good organizing tool, although maybe unconsciously, I was already beggining to understand.

But I was used by people for a long time until I wised up. It wasn't that they wanted to do it, but that I was not prepared or able to tell them what to do in return. My work was just another war on poverty gimick, which is what happens when people are given everything and don't give anything in return. you can't mold them into any action.

Well, one night it just hit me. Once you helped people, most became very loyal. The people who helped us back when we wanted volunteers were the people we had helped. So I began to get a group of those people around me.

Once I realized helping people was an organizing technique, I increased that work. I was willing to work all day and night and go to hell and back for people- provided they also did something for the CSO in return. I never felt bad asking for that. It didn't contradict my parents' teachings, because I wasn't asking for something for myself.

For a long time we didn't know how to put that work together into an organization. But we learned after a while- we learned how to help people by making them responsible. Today it's the same principle with the Union. And it works. We don't get everybody, but we get enough to get that nucleus. I think solving problems for people is the only way to build solid groups.”
― Cesar Chavez

“To acknowledge the existence of the bully and his accompanying risks is not the same as accepting him as a permanent feature of our world. I know that if we accept trauma and fear, it wins.

"Bullies don’t just go away. Their legacies don’t just disappear. The bully must be confronted intentionally, his impact named and addressed. Even so, it seems there’s no clear consensus on how to deal with the bully on our blocks. Do we confront him? Match violence with violence? Do we ignore him, or try to kill him with kindness? I don’t think there’s a silver bullet to handling the bully, no one-size-fits-all strategy. But the right strategy has to be rooted in a context bigger than the immediate one, has to be rooted in more than aiming to end the presence of the bully himself. We must focus on the type of world we want to live in and devise a plan for getting there, as opposed to devising a strategy centered on opposition.”
― DeRay McKesson, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope

“I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Disaster shocks us out of slumber, but only skillful efforts keeps us awake.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

“You can always hope and wait for someone to want something in your home, but you cannot wait forever, and sometimes you must just give cherished things away with the wish that they end up with someone who will create new memories of their own.”
― Margareta Magnusson, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter

“I dusted my books off, placing each one—sorted alphabetically and by genre—on the shelves Dad installed. What some people might call “anal,” I’d call efficient. What good was it to have a book if you couldn’t find it when you wanted it?”
― aileen erin, Becoming Alpha

“Organizing is a process; an organization is the result of that process.”
― Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

“My choice of a lighter lifestyle has brought me a greater sense of well-being. In a world that often seems stressful and chaotic, that’s a feeling I cherish.”
― Lisa J. Shultz, Lighter Living: Declutter. Organize. Simplify.

“Even when there was segregation there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.”
― Rosa Parks

“Your home is in disarray. How you got there is the reason for the mess, but not the reason for staying in it.”
― Bonnie Borromeo Tomlinson, Stop Buying Bins: & other blunt but practical advice from a home organizer

“There is no final solution, no theory that will explain everything. There is no road map to a better society, no didactic ideology, no rule book. All we can do is choose our allies and our friends--our comrades, as [Ignazio Silone] puts it--with great care, for only with them, together, is it possible to avoid the temptations of the different forms of authoritarianism once again on offer. Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions. Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars; together we can rethink what democracy should look like in a digital age.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“I WILL NOT ALLOW MY NEGATIVE FEELINGS TO CONTROL ME; I WILL REMAIN POSITIVE"

-Stephanie”
― Stephanie A. Colavalla, Clean Up Your Home To Clean Up Your Life & Say Hello To Aromatherapy: Restore Your Sanctuary, Regain Your Peace, Ignite Your Senses

“INSTEAD OF ASKING OTHERS

WHAT DO YOU THINK I SHOULD DO

LOOK IN THE MIRROR AND TELL YOURSELF

I GOT THIS”
― Stephanie A. Colavalla, Clean Up Your Home To Clean Up Your Life & Say Hello To Aromatherapy: Restore Your Sanctuary, Regain Your Peace, Ignite Your Senses

“It is important to pause to celebrate those victories, no matter how small,' she says, 'because that is what gives you courage to fight the really big battles, the ones you have to fight even though there's no chance of winning.' [Kay Drey on stopping 1 of 2 nuclear reactors from being built]”
― Lacy M. Johnson, The Reckonings

“Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It is a social force any group can utilize by accumulating its elements in a planned, deliberate campaign to organize it under its own control.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“I love being at home, I always have. I love having my own space just the way I like it, I love organising things the way that makes sense to me, I love being surrounded by things I love and I love feeling comfortable.”
― Estée Lalonde, Bloom: navigating life and style

“When organizing remember that everybody has a family and every family has a home.”
― Helena Alkhas, Vivendo sem Empregada

“Technology is great when used effectively but do not allow it to use you”
― Margo Vader, Take A Little Soul Time

“The wise child realizes there are limits to organizing everything. Sometimes it is better to stop; just have fun and do as you like. If a person goes too far in organizing everything all of the time, that is when common sense fails; that is when real trouble happens.”
― Ruth Ann Oskolkoff, Voyage to the Sun: A Children's Version of the Tao te Ching

“Passive acceptance cripples our power. Working-class people with a strong united voice, and supported by formidable leadership, pose a TREMENDOUS threat to companies that amass riches by hiding behind lax regulations and the arrogant assumption we are too intimidated or uninformed to speak up.”
― Carlos Wallace

“At the same time we organize behind specific and urgent issues, we must also develop and maintain an ongoing vision, and the theory following upon that vision, of why we struggle—of the shape and taste and philosophy of what we wish to see.”
― Audre Lorde

“We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
― Umberto Eco

“Never organize what you can discard.”
― Joshua Becker, The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life

“Organization is the only tool we have to defend ourselves against the present system. It is the only way to fight the injustices being committed against the workers, who produce everything

(From Ensayos Libertarios)”
― Luisa Capetillo

“it's vital to avoid a longtime error of leftist politics, starting with Marxism: failure to understand the powerful role in human society of subjective forces such as spirituality. That failure has opened the door wide to right-wing manipulation of spiritual hunger. That failure undermines the possibility of mobilizing masses of Latinos/as for whom faith has been an affirmation of heart in a heartless world. The bottom line in any organizing for social justice needs to be respect for others' needs, including spiritual needs.”
― Elizabeth Martínez, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century

“With help from its friends, however, democracy can almost always be repaired, then made better.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“Detroit filmmaker Oya Amakisi once shared with me the words of General Baker, a Detroit labor organizer and leader, who said, “You keep asking how do we get the people here? I say, what will we do when they get here?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Before many of us can effectively sustain engagement in organized resistance struggle, in black liberation movement, we need to undergo a process of self-recovery that can heal individual wounds that may prevent us from functioning fully.”
― bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery