There's no reason to be non-violent. There's no challenge unless you are living for people.

Across the San Joaquin Valley, across California, across the entire Southwest of the United States, wherever there are Mexican people, wherever there are farm workers, our movement is spreading like flames across a dry plain.

The name of the game is to talk to people. If you don't talk to people, you can't get started...You knock on twenty doors or so, and twenty guys tell you to go to hell, or that they haven't got time. But maybe at the fortieth or sixtieth house you find the one guy who is all you need. You're not going to organize everything; you're just going to get it started.

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed.

We are suffering. We have suffered. And we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause.

From the depth of need and despair, people can work together, can organize themselves to solve their own problems and fill their own needs with dignity and strength.

If you're not frightened that you might fail, you'll never do the job. If you're frightened, you'll work like crazy.