Success Quote by Patricia Ireland

The line reads like a field note from someone who’s watched movements flare up, make headlines, and then evaporate the moment the cameras move on. Patricia Ireland isn’t romanticizing “the people”; she’s arguing, in blunt organizer logic, that the real battleground in a grass-roots campaign is time. Winning the “ultimate goal” is a snapshot. A base is infrastructure.

Her phrasing quietly reorders what counts as success. “As important as” is the tell: it punctures the winner-take-all fantasy that a single legislative victory, court ruling, or election night can settle a fight. The subtext is almost preventative: if you chase the big win without building durable relationships, you’ll get a fragile policy that can be undone, a coalition that splinters, a membership list that goes cold. In other words, you’ll win and still lose.

Ireland’s context matters. As a prominent feminist leader in the late 20th century, she operated in a landscape where gains on reproductive rights, workplace equality, and anti-discrimination policy were routinely followed by backlash, defunding, court challenges, and cultural counter-mobilization. Her sentence anticipates that churn. It’s a warning against movement tourism and crisis-driven activism: showing up only when a vote is imminent, donating only when a panic email lands, treating politics as a series of emergencies rather than a long campaign.

The intent is pragmatic and slightly unsentimental: movements should think like institutions without becoming them. Build the base, because the base is what makes the next fight winnable, and what keeps today’s win from being temporary.