Paul Wellstone

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

Our politics are our deepest form of expression: they mirror our past experiences and reflect our dreams and aspirations for the future.

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.

Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning.

Politics is about the improvement of people's lives. It's about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people.

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

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

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.

Our aims in political activism are not, and should not be, to create a perfect utopia.

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.

Without trying, I'm different.