Paul Wellstone's Quotes

Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning.

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

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

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

We can remake the world daily.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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?

There are three critical ingredients to democratic renewal and progressive change in America: good public policy, grassroots organizing and electoral politics.

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.

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 live from the words you speak.

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

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.

Sometimes, the only realists are the dreamers.

I saw as a teacher how, if you take that spark of learning that those children have, and you ignite it, you can take a child from any background to a lifetime of creativity and accomplishment.

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.

Politics isn't about big money or power games; it's about the improvement of people's lives.

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.

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