40 Positive Activism Quotes To Inspire Meaningful Collective Action

You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Activism works. So, what I’m telling you to do now, is to act. Because no one is too small to make a difference.
- Greta Thunberg

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
- Elie Wiesel

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
- Anne Frank

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
- Albert Einstein

When you see something that is not just, not fair, or not right, you have to do something. You have to say something. Make a little noise. It's time for us to get into good trouble, necessary trouble.
- John Lewis

Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead

One individual cannot possibly make a difference, alone. It is individual efforts, collectively, that makes a noticeable difference—all the difference in the world!
- Jane Goodall

The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.
- Coretta Scott King

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.
- Bob Marley

I'm convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they're stones that don't matter. As long as you're breathing, it's never too late to do some good.
- Maya Angelou

It means a great deal to those who are oppressed to know that they are not alone. Never let anyone tell you that what you are doing is insignificant.
- Desmond Tutu

The world is full of what seem like intractable problems. Often we let that paralyze us. Instead, let it spur you to action.
- Dolores Huerta

People of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.
- Ovid

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.
- Thomas Paine

Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.
- Grace Lee Boggs

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

We can't just hope for a brighter day, we have to work for a brighter day. Love too often gets buried in a world of hurt and fear. And we have to work to dig it out so we can share it with our family, our friends, and our neighbors.
- Dolly Parton

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters.
- Frederick Douglass

No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.
- Daisy Bates

Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn't shake but inside I was shaking.
- James L. Farmer Jr.

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 did and it never will.
- Frederick Douglass

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.
- Nelson Mandela

We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back. We call upon our sisters around the world to be brave — to embrace the strength within themselves and realize their full potential.
- Malala Yousafzai

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
- Elie Wiesel

Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth ... These are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security, and women's empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all.
- Ban Ki-moon

If someone needs to express their gender in a way that is different, that is okay. They don’t deserve to be victims of violence. If you are uncomfortable with it, then you need to look at yourself.
- Laverne Cox

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.
- Dr. Seuss

We who have means and a voice must use them to help those who have neither.
- Jennifer Donnelly

A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.
- Barack Obama

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.
- Howard Zinn

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
- Martin Luther King Jr.

If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.
- Albert Einstein

The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.
- Kurt Cobain

Waiting until everything looks feasible is too long to wait.
- Rebecca Solnit

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
- Audre Lorde