You're More Powerful than You Think Quotes

“If you don’t learn how to practice power, someone else will do it for you—in your name, on your turf, with your voice, and often against your interests.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“Power justifies itself, in countless small ways. But one of the big ways it does so is by creating an ideological narrative about how things got to be this way—and what must now change. These narratives are more than technical explanations. They are epic morality tales, and they typically follow this sequence: Paradise Paradise Lost Paradise Redeemed”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“uses a method for organizing that centers on three nested narratives: the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. He teaches organizers entering into any setting to start not with policy proposals or high concepts like justice but with biographies—their own, and those of the people they hope to mobilize. What are the stories you tell about yourself? Why do you tell them that way? How can we find connections across our stories of origin that build trust and common cause?”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“In our country, there is so much that’s wrong with the way we deliver care to the aging, the very young, and the infirm. But you can’t beat something with nothing. It is not enough to decry what’s broken. You have to describe the alternative and make it possible for people to believe in it. To care.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“If you want to change the story that justifies current structures of power and privilege, you must have such a combination of bold goals and specific steps.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“The Bechdel-Wallace test is a similarly simple device, created by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, for evaluating whether movies and television shows perpetuate gender inequity. Does a film have at least two named women in it, talking to each other, about something other than a man? A depressingly large number of films and shows fail the test. But it does more than scold. It suggests an alternate reality—an achievable one—in which women have an equal presence in mass popular culture, and the screen represents more than just the gaze of a (non-feminist) man.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“• First, power concentrates. That is, it feeds on itself and compounds (as does powerlessness). • Second, power justifies itself. People invent stories to legitimize the power they have (or lack). • Third, power is infinite. There is no inherent limit on the amount of power people can create.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“warns about the dangers of treating art and creativity as commodities. A commodity mindset deadens human bonds of trust and affection.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“By deliberately withholding power, you generate more. By choosing to redirect it, you remember that the choice is yours. Such acts remind us how much dormant civic power we actually have—and how infrequently we ever activate that potential in full.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“Every person and institution with power in our society today has it because we give it to them.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized--and therefore more susceptible to despotism.

He warned that if the "habits of the heart" fed by civic clubs and active self-government evaporated, citizens would regress to pure egoism. They would stop thinking about things greater than their immediate circle. Public life would disappear. And that would only accelerate their own disempowerment.

This is painfully close to a description of the United States since Trump and Europe since Brexit. And the only way to reverse this vicious cycle of retreat and atrophy is to reverse it: to find a sense of purpose that is greater than the self, and to exercise power with others and for others in democratic life.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“During the civil rights movement, large majorities of the public thought that Freedom Rides and lunch-counter sit-ins and marches across militarized bridges were counterproductive, and that reform was moving too quickly and disruptively. Today, all those tactics have been sanctified in national memory.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“As a result of this creeping public fatalism, we now have depressingly low levels of civic participation, knowledge, engagement, and awareness. Political life has been subcontracted out to a band of professionals—money people, message people, outreach people. The rest of us are made to feel like amateurs, as in suckers. We become demotivated to learn more about how things work. And this pervasive power illiteracy becomes, in a vicious cycle, both a cause and a consequence of the concentration of opportunity, wealth, and clout in society.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized—and therefore more susceptible to despotism.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“But in this era of concentrated wealth, severe inequality, and rigged rules we have a master narrative that power is inherently evil. That’s why the civic myths of this age are dark political melodramas like House of Cards and grim fantasies like Game of Thrones in which nice guys finish headless and the only winners are those who lie, cheat, and kill. We’re not in The West Wing anymore, folks. Mr. Smith died in Washington.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“Remind yourself and others that power is in fact infinite—that we can create it where it does not exist. Our final strategy for doing that is simply this: act powerful. When we act powerful we become powerful. That plays out in the poses and stances we strike in civic life, in the art we make together in everyday life, and in the reality of minority rule.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“Change the game: 1. Adjust the arena. 2. Re-rig the rules. 3. Attack the plan. Change the story: 1. Describe the alternative. 2. Organize in narratives. 3. Make your fight a fable. Change the equation: 1. Act exponentially. 2. Act reciprocally. 3. Perform your power.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“The story of El Centro’s creation and flourishing reminds us that civic power may not require a plan—but it does require a purpose.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“It was there, during the 1960s, that his evolution into a firebrand revolutionary began. He became a vocal leader in the emerging Chicano movement. He joined black student activist Larry Gossett, Native American leader Bernie Whitebear, and Asian American leader Bob Santos to create multiracial coalitions for justice in education, policing, immigration, and other issues. Together they became masters of organizing and direct action. The so-called Four Amigos were bonded by personal chemistry. But they also recognized that in predominantly white Seattle, they were stronger together.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“We haven’t truly enabled all the people of this society to participate in self-government to the fullest extent of their potential. We haven’t come close, not in an age when our elected officials and their staffs are overwhelmingly white, male, and affluent. Nor have we truly enabled all the people of this society to participate fully in economic life as creators and contributors. Not when 48 percent of the new jobs in the country are low-wage jobs paying less than $15 an hour, and when tens of millions rely on government payments for subsistence. And we haven’t truly enabled the citizens of this country to be as powerful as possible. Not when voter turnout is rarely above 60 percent (at best) and when poor, nonwhite, or immigrant voters are still being disenfranchised.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“They share a vision of a society where more people are able to claim and create more power—for themselves, by themselves—against the encroachments of others. And they now share an experience that teaches them that it is both possible and necessary to create power: to activate people who very reasonably could believe that the deck is so stacked against them that there’s no point in getting involved.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“In civically flourishing societies, the people remember that the system is healthiest and most robust when power emerges from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. In such societies, the people recognize that it is not only fair that power be circulated widely; it is also wise.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“In American politics, power is presumptively illegitimate. It’s important to remember this. Our founding is premised on the notion that power is inherently hostile to freedom. The pamphlets of the Revolution are heavy with warnings that citizens must “jealously” guard their liberties against tyrannies of the state. The Constitution, even as it created a stronger national government, hobbled that government with checks and balances, separations of power, local prerogatives, and deliberate ambiguities meant to be resolved in favor of the people. So if power has always been suspect here, on what basis does it truly earn legitimacy in America? On this basis only: inclusion. From hatred of “taxation without representation” to passion for “equal protection of the law,” we Americans have believed in and preached inclusion. Even when we have failed to practice it.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“Which is why, from the Inca Empire to the Soviet Union, extractive societies have been prone to collapse. Power naturally flows to the top. We’ve established that. But where power flows to the top and stays there, without correction or recirculation, a society is likely to die a catastrophic death.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“a result of this creeping public fatalism, we now have depressingly low levels of civic participation, knowledge, engagement, and awareness. Political life has been subcontracted out to a band of professionals—money people, message people, outreach people. The rest of us are made to feel like amateurs, as in suckers. We become demotivated to learn more about how things work. And this pervasive power illiteracy becomes, in a vicious cycle, both a cause and a consequence of the concentration of opportunity, wealth, and clout in society.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen

“The average American is heard only if wealthy donors happen to be saying the same thing.”
― Eric Liu, You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen