Paul Wellstone Quotes

Successful organizing is not built on self-interest but rather on dignity and a sense of purpose.

Politics is about the improvement of people's lives. It's about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people.

Education and democracy have the same goal: the fullest possible development of human capabilities.

The future belongs to those who are passionate and work hard.

I don't think politics has anything to do with left, right, or center. It has to do with trying to do right by people.

We're not going to have real security until we invest in our children.

The only way to change is to vote. People are responsible.

We can and must move U.S. politics forward by means of committed participation.

Without trying, I'm different.

We all do better when we all do better.

We can remake the world daily.

Traditional progressive bread and butter economic issues are the heart of the solution. It's about ensuring decent jobs with a good wage. It's about ensuring a free public education in all the communities of America, whether they are in the shiny new affluent suburbs or the crumbling old schools of the older suburbs and cities. It's about ensuring a system where all Americans have access to health care, instead of a steadily declining share of our population.

Politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine.

What the poor, the weak, and the inarticulate desperately require is power, organization, and a sense of identity and purpose, not rarefied advice of political scientists.

Let there be no distance between the words you say and the life you live.

If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.

Never separate the life you lead from the words you speak.

A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.

The future will belong to those who have passion and are willing to work hard to make our country better.

Politics is not left, right or center ... It's about improving people's lives.

If a teacher does not involve himself, his values, his commitments, in the course of discussion, why should the students?

As free citizens in a political democracy, we have a responsibility to be interested and involved in the affairs of the human community, be it at the local or the global level.

Never separate the life you live from the words you speak.

It is the belief that extremes and excesses of inequality must be reduced so that each person is free to fully develop his or her full potential. This is why we take precious time out of our lives and give it to politics.

We need a new kind of citizenship, so that we can see citizens as themselves earning the rank of patriot because of their involvement in their community affairs ... We as a society need to be encouraging people to focus not just on individual wants but on serving the larger community.

I'm short, I'm Jewish and I'm a liberal.

Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning.

I do believe that there's going to be a pretty strong consensus for a very strong .. censure resolution.

Successful organizing is based on the recognition that people get organized because they, too, have a vision.

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

We must regain our vision and hope and move our country forward on an agenda of peace and justice.

The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.

I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.

How can we live in the richest, most privileged country in the world, at the peak of its economic performance, and still hear the Republicans, and too many Democrats, that we cannot afford to provide a good education for every child, that we cannot afford to provide health security for all our citizens?

The people of this country, not special interest big money, should be the source of all political power.

There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans.

The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy.

The Democratic Party has lost much of it credibility with working class and low-income people. It retards progress toward presenting a genuine alternative.

The kind of national goal we ought to be thinking about is way beyond national product - it is how do we as a nation help our children be the best kinds of people they could possibly be?

We must renew democracy itself. We have to fight cynicism and inertia and restore faith in the advancement of our country.

Sometimes, the only realists are the dreamers.