Paul Wellstone

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.

When too many Americans don't vote or participate, some see apathy and despair. I see disappointment and even outrage. And I believe that out of this frustration can come hope and action.

There is a major ingredient missing from our perception of how changes are brought about; that ingredient is power.

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.

Above and beyond the question of how to grow the economy there is a legitimate concern about how to grow the quality of our lives.

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.

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.

I was talking about no nukes, the farm crisis. People said that wasn't stuff that a state auditor was supposed to be talking about. Maybe they were right.

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

Politics is not about money.

Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning.

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

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

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.

The first task in teaching is to bring to consciousness what the students already believe by virtue of their personal experiences about themselves and society.

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

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?

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.

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.

Why don't we call on the credit card companies to be accountable? They need to be held accountable for their predatory lending practices.

Without trying, I'm different.

We all do better when we all do better.

Sometimes, the only realists are the dreamers.

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.