In times when the tempo for struggle is not very high, you prepare populations by conducting acts of courage-building, confidence-building, respect for each other. That's what the preparation is about and it requires leadership.

I think a far more important strategic way to deal with the Islamic State would be to bring some of these regional partners and explain to them that Turkey's own contradictory foreign policy has to end. I mean, if United States is serious, it has leverage over Turkey. And apparently it has not been able to move Turkey sufficiently.

To build a mass movement, nonviolence is indispensable.

There's a right-wing shift in Israeli society, very hard right shift.

Interestingly, what the bourgeois women's groups in India wanted to do in the nationalist period is to have the peasant women essentially follow them... They would be the leaders and the peasant women would be the masses.

In the early period of Left struggles, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were many different trajectories for the struggle, whether you call it 'syndicalism' or 'anarchism' or, at the time, 'social democracy', eventually 'Communism', these were different theories of struggle. But all of them shared a basic understanding that the people...experience exploitation, they experience oppression, but they're not prepared to rise up.

Organizing is always a relationship between the person who arrives and says 'Let's meet together' and the person who comes to the meeting.