“We criticize and separate ourselves from the process. We’ve got to jump right in there with both feet.”

I am happy to see that, increasingly, people care about farm workers. There is tremendous interest in where and how our food is grown.

Employers able to work together with workers and sharing gains and profits will lead to a much better world, getting away from income inequality.

Once you see the outcomes and the results, and you see how many people are helped and benefitting, you want to keep on doing it because it’s so simple.

I’m glad that the fact that people are still getting poisoned by pesticide drift is gaining attention.

Once I learned about grassroots organizing, I got so enamored with it because I thought ‘Wow this is the way you do it!’

We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things. That is what we are put on the earth for.

Why is it that farmworkers feed the nation but they can’t get food stamps?

I call myself an addicted organizer.

My children grew up very resourceful and strong in spite of them having to live with different families and that I had to drag them all over the country with me.

My mother was a dominant force in our family. And that was great for me as a young woman, because I never saw that women had to be dominated by men.

The thing about nonviolence is that it spreads. When you get people to participate in nonviolent action – whether it’s a fast, a march, a boycott, or a picket line – people hear you, people see you, people are learning from that action.

We can’t let people drive wedges between us, because there’s only one human race.

Don’t be a marshmallow. Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk. Stop being vegetables. Work for Justice. Viva the boycott!

Leadership is a choice one makes.

Going door to door and talking to people, convincing them to vote – this is what I call Organizing 101.

Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk.

Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes them strive to justify themselves. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts their sense of importance, and arouses resentment.

I’m my own worst critic, and if I don’t pull off what I think I wanted to do in my head, then I won’t be a happy girl.

Animals don’t lie. Animals don’t criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do.

This is no game. You get up in there, and you take some punches. You risk your life, and then let me see you talk then. That’s why I don’t respect people who criticize fighters.

I despise the opinion of the press and the so-called critics.

People have said things about me, and wrote and criticized me about things in the past, but it goes in one ear and out the other.

Look for intelligence and judgment and, most critically, a capacity to anticipate, to see around corners. Also look for loyalty, integrity, a high energy drive, a balanced ego and the drive to get things done.

I always take criticism as a challenge. It’s the way I’ve always looked at it.