“The way things change is because lots of people are working all the time. They are working in their communities, in their workplace, wherever they happen to be. They are building up the basis for popular movements which are going to make the changes. That’s the way everything has ever happened in history. Whether it was the end of slavery, or whether it was the democratic revolutions, anything you want, you name it, that’s the way it worked.

You get a very false picture of this from the history books. In history books, there is a couple of leaders, George Washington, or Martin Luther King. I don’t want to say that these people aren’t important. Martin Luther King was certainly important, but he was not the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King can appear in the history books because lots of people whose names you will never know, and these names are all forgotten, they have been killed and so on, were working down in the south.”

– Noam Chomsky