Grace Lee Boggs
I don't know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but we might be able to imagine it if your imagination were rich enough.Collection: Imagination
When I was growing up, Asians were so few and far between as to be almost invisible. And so the idea of an Asian American movement or an Asian American thrust in this country was unthinkable.
I was working with C. L. R. James; I believed in Marxist ideas about the labor and movement and the workers being the secret to the future. And I learned differently just by being in Detroit and being married to Jimmy Boggs.
I warn you, I'm a terrible housekeeper.
I had no idea what I was gonna do after I got my degree in philosophy in 1940. But what I did know was at that time, if you were a Chinese-American, even department stores wouldn't hire you. They'd come right out and say, 'We don't hire Orientals.'
I think that's a very important part of what we need in this country, is that sense that we have lived through so many stages and that we are entering into a new stage where we could create something completely different.
When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air and it came down, it would hit an autoworker because the Chrysler Jefferson plant where my husband worked was very close also to where we lived.
I think Detroit is already providing a model for change in the world. I think that Detroit - I mean, people come from all over the world come to see what we're doing. People are looking for a new way of living.
Jimmy Boggs was born in a little town called Marion Junction, Alabama, where there were as many pigs, or more pigs, than even the people. But you know what? People in the South had an understanding that you could make a way out of no way, and that's how they survived.
You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.Collection: Responsibility
We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.Collection: Connections
To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical/ spiritual leap and become more 'human' human beings. In order to change/ transform the world, they must change/ transform themselves.Collection: Spiritual
You don't choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be.Collection: Thinking
People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.Collection: Spiritual
A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.Collection: Creativity
The only way to survive is by taking care of one another.Collection: Care
Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.Collection: Spiritual
We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.Collection: Garden
Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas.Collection: Reality
Being a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother's womb is not enough to make you human. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that achieves power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously adopted different values.Collection: Mother
Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day afterCollection: Love Is
We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present.Collection: Creativity
Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future...A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices, a revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future...It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have - creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility.Collection: Creativity
I think we have to rethink the concept of “leader.” 'Cause “leader” implies “follower.” And, so many- not so many, but I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for.Collection: Thinking
Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.Collection: Inspirational
I think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our souls rather than our economy. I think that at some level, people recognize that growing our economy is destroying us. It's destroying us as human beings, it's destroying our planet. I think there's a great human desire for solutions, for profound solutions - and that nothing simple will do it. It really requires some very great searching of our souls.Collection: Simple
The most radical thing I ever did was to stay put.Collection: Radical
History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.Collection: Cutting
We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.Collection: Wall
When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings.Collection: Jesus
I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people.Collection: Heart
What time is it on the clock of the world?Collection: World
The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.Collection: Children
I believe that we are at the point now, in the United States, where a movement is beginning to emerge.Collection: Believe
I'm not calling for a boycott on voting. But I think it should be very clear that just voting is not going to solve our problems.Collection: Thinking
The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists - as starting revolutions - does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much America was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments.Collection: Thinking
The Vietnam War was taking place, which was raising all sorts of questions in the United States, and it was forcing Asian-Americans to stop thinking of themselves as model minorities and to identify themselves more with world revolution, which was very important in my development.Collection: War
I think that rebellions arise out of anger, and they're very short-lived. And a revolution has some sense of a long time frame, millions of years that we've been evolving on this planet.Collection: Thinking
I think most people do not imagine how things can change. In Detroit, there are community gardens that are only an indication that the country is coming back to the city. And that is something that actually is necessary to stop the real imminent danger of the extermination of our planet.Collection: Country
When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air it would hit an autoworker on its way down. A few years after that, if you threw a stone in the air it'd hit an abandoned house or a vacant lot on its way down. And most people saw those vacant lots as blight. But meanwhile during World War II, blacks had moved from the South to the North. And they saw these vacant lots as places where you could grow food for the community. And so urban agriculture was born.Collection: War
I think we have to understand that the nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization.Collection: Powerful
One of the things that's very important, when you're an activist and an organizer like me, is to understand that when things happen of that nature, some people become immobilized and other people begin to find solutions. And Detroit is the kind of city where we begin to find solutions.Collection: Cities
I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another. We have to see today in light of the transition, say, from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from agriculture to industry, and from industry to post-industry. We're in an epoch transition.Collection: Thinking
This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old.Collection: Years
It's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking.Collection: Strong
Really, people are not a school of fish. Finding the leaders of the future is a question of recognizing those people who give leadership in a crisis.Collection: School
The nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization.Collection: Powerful
We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.Collection: Law
We have to think in a very different sense than the way we think now. We think in terms of quick fixes, that solutions will come out of a few protest demonstrations, and calling upon the government to do something. And we can keep trying to do that, and it won't work.Collection: Thinking
The idea of protest organizing, as summarized by community organizer Saul Alinsky, is that if we put enough pressure on the government, it will do things to help people. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking. But with globalization and the weakening of the nation-state, that kind of organizing doesn't work.Collection: Strong