Grace Lee Boggs Quotes

As I witness and participate in our visionary efforts to revitalize Detroit and contrast them with the multibillion dollars' worth of megaprojects advanced by politicians and developed that involve casinos, giant stadiums, gentrification, and the Super Bowl, I am saddened by their shortsightedness. At the same time I rejoice in the energy being unleashed in the community by our human-scale programs that involve bringing the country back into the city and removing the walls between schools and communities, between generations, and between ethnic groups. And I am confident just as in the early twentieth century people came from around the world to marvel at the mass production lines pioneered by Henry Ford, in the twenty-first century they will be coming to marvel at the thriving neighborhoods that are the fruit of our visionary programs. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

I think we're not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

I have learned to savor every minute of time with my four year old daughter not only because I know how quickly children grow up but also because I have no idea what state the world will be in when she is my age. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

I warn you, I'm a terrible housekeeper. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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.' ~ Grace Lee Boggs

I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit.1 ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

The nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

We need to do what I call visionary organizing. Recognize that in every crisis, people do not respond like a school of fish. Some people become immobilized. Some people become very angry, some commit suicide, and other people begin to find solutions. And visionary organizers look at those people, recognize them and encourage them, and they become leaders of the future. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

We have to understand that the closer you get to the corridors of power, to the Oval Office and Congress, the more you become a prisoner of the past .The closer you get to the marginalized, the grassroots and the groundlings, the greater your incentive to think imaginatively and 'outside the box. ~ Team Colors Collective

The main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality, or an awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe, according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological development over human and community development. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

Over the past seventy years the various identity struggles have to some degree remediated the great wrongs that have been done to workers, people of color, Indigenous Peoples, women, gays and lesbians, and the disabled, while helping to humanize our society overall. But they have also had a shadow side in the sense that they have encouraged us to think of ourselves more as determined than as self-determining, more as victims of 'isms' (racism, sexism, capitalism, ableism) than as human beings who have the power of choice. For our own survival we must assume individual and collective responsibility for creating a new nation - one that is loved rather than feared and one that does not have to bribe and bully other nations to win support. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

It takes time for change to take place. But then when huge changes are taking place, they are extraordinary. And it requires a kind of philosophical thinking, thinking in terms of epochs. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

We need to undergo a very radical revolution in values. And we need to think about what it's like to have become so materialistic that we think having a good job, and consuming like crazy to compensate for the dehumanization of the job, is living like a human being. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

We're in a very, very profound crisis. It's so obvious that no one in the power structure, either the corporate power structure or the political power structure, knows what to do or is willing to do what's necessary in relationship both to global war and global warming. It's so obvious that conditions are getting worse for the great majority of Americans. It's so obvious also that we face a very serious danger from people who feel, see themselves only as victims. And we have to somehow, in a very loving way, help the American people to recover the best that is in our traditions. ~ 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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

The only way to survive is by taking care of one another. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

What time is it on the clock of the world? ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

The struggle we're dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 60s represented, is how do we define our humanity? ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

I think that rebellions arise out of anger, and they're very short-lived. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

Through this tradition of face-to-face oral communication, now in danger of disappearing, black folks maintained the conviction of their own worth and saved their own souls by refusing to fall victim to fear or the hatred of their oppressors, which they recognized would have been more destructive to themselves than to their enemies. As the poet Lucille Clifton put it, "Ultimately if you fill yourself with venom you will be poisoned."3 There were incidents of individual violence, usually crimes of passion committed by someone under the influence of alcohol and over a man or a woman. But despite the unimaginable cruelty that they suffered, blacks kept their sense of humor and created the art form of the blues as a way to work through and transcend the harshness of their lives. Living under the American equivalent of Nazism, they developed an oasis of civility in the spiritual desert of "me-firstism" that characterized the rest of the country. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; ~ Grace Lee Boggs

Well, I would say that we've got to redefine democracy, that we have been stuck in concepts of representative democracy, that we believe that it's getting other people to do things for us that we progress. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

How are we going to make our livings in a society becoming increasingly jobless because of hi-tech and outsourcing? Where will we get the imagination to recognize that for most of human history the concept of Jobs didn't even exist? Work, as distinguished from Labor, was done to produce needed goods and services, develop skills and artistry, and nurture cooperation. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

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. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after ~ Grace Lee Boggs

We're at a great transition point in terms of population, demographics, and what it means to be a human being. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

My sense, although I don't remember discussing it with anyone, was that with the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, European civilization had collapsed. I also recalled that although both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey had been born in New England, they developed their distinctively American philosophy of pragmatism in Chicago. So thinking of my own New England roots, I decided to go to Chicago, which, seen through Carl Sandburg's eyes, was the opposite of European decadence: Hog Butcher for the World, Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler, Stormy, husky, brawling. City of the Big Shoulders.7 ~ Grace Lee Boggs

Some people are afraid of gentrification, but what I see is young people want to live in a different world. And they see possibilities here. They see that rents are relatively cheap compared to places like New York and California. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

My life is happy, joyous, free, sober and saved, and a lot of fun, too. I have a lot of fun. ~ Grace Lee Whitney

Amazing grace how sweet thuh sound That saved a wretch like me; I once was lost but now I'm found, Was blind, but now I see. A-men." Jem ~ Harper Lee

I want to listen to accomplished women scarred by sexism that still walk in elegance and kindness; hear powerful men that have a heart to serve. I want to talk to the brokenhearted that still believe in love; I want to listen to people that laugh even when they hurt. You live God's grace without even knowing it and to me, you're the best of all of us. ~ Lee Goff

It's hard to think seriously about grace until you understand that you've failed morally and will someday stand accountable before a holy God. ~ Lee Strobel

I'm in a great place because I've gone full circle. ~ Grace Lee Whitney

The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace. ~ Lauren Groff

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shinning sea! ~ Katharine Lee Bates

When I told the fans I was an alcoholic, they all applauded. When I told them I had given myself to a higher power, they cheered again. ~ Grace Lee Whitney

face." I sat spellbound. Here it was - the image of grace I had been seeking: an aspiring father bringing unconditional acceptance to a child who had absolutely nothing to offer, no accolades or accomplishments, just herself in all of her vulnerability and scars and weaknesses. My eyes moistened. This is the love of a dad. Maybe - just maybe - this is the love of a Father. ~ Lee Strobel

I can share my dreams, and even encourage you along the way, but you have to have your own dreams. You have to want for something, and work towards it. Don't give up in when you feel overwhelmed, undeserving or unprepared. He has given you the gift(s) you will need. If you remember that, fear will have no place to reside. ~ J'son M. Lee

Never permit yourself to indulge in cheap flattery, which often times means to merely satisfy the individuals vanity and sometimes to ingratiate the flatter into the good graces of the flattered. ~ Harold B. Lee

The body is not a task to be completed but a gift we receive from God himself. ~ Matthew Lee Anderson

But Patsy, she was a great, great girl. And Brenda Lee is a wonderful person, and her mama Grace. I've known those folks for years and years and years. ~ Mel Tillis

Jesus's death has infinite value because he's an infinite God; it was enough to cover all the sins of the world. If we say some sin is too terrible, then we're saying Jesus fell short in his mission. Grace is only grace if it's available even to the Duchs of the world. In fact," he said, straightening himself in his chair, "here's a difficult thing for us to comprehend: God loves Duch as much as he loves you and me. ~ Lee Strobel

There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character
shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the
bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual - her mother did the same. ~ Harper Lee

Someone has to remember. ~ Lisa Roecker

Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, had a lamp shade on her head. Again. ~ Y.S. Lee

All we needed when we first came to Jesus was his grace, and grace is all we need to grow in Christ. Grace liberates us. Our tendency toward performance imprisons us. ~ Lee Strobel

Grace had turned to Leeza, Ken, her boyfriend, Brian, and baking. She started by baking the family recipes from her childhood. Cinnamon buns, gingersnaps, saffron bread, and lingonberry pancakes. Grace knew she didn't have her mother's talent, but she tried her best and hoped it might also bring her mother back to earth. Maybe even bring the two of them closer.
One afternoon, Grace made a German chocolate cake. She decided to try something different, and added fresh local Door County sour cherries to the batter. When Ken tasted it, he'd fallen on the floor, exclaiming, "I'm dead, but at least I went to heaven: Death by chocolate! ~ Sandra Lee

We can never sink so far that God's grace will not reach us. At the same time, grace does not leave us there. It raises us to new heights. ~ Lee Strobel

That is the joyful task of every follower of Jesus. Someday may it be written about me on my tombstone: He was so amazed by God's grace that he couldn't keep it to himself. ~ Lee Strobel

while grace sets apart Christianity, so does truth. Jesus was filled with grace and truth, and in Christianity you can know the truth, not just through some sort of spiritual experience, but also through careful investigation. ~ Lee Strobel

If anyone had a right to lecture people about their sin, it was the sinless son of God. If even he could meet sinners as equals, how much more should we Christians
all sinners ourselves
treat as equals the people we encounter in our lives? ~ Justin Lee

There are things we can't change, and we just have to accept that. And maybe that's some kind of grace ~ Bryan Lee O'Malley

This age is truly crooked, perverse, and adulterous; it is full of fornication and immorality. People talk about immorality without one bit of shame. Who can stand in such a generation? Not one of us is able to stand. We all have a fallen nature within us, the same evil nature that all men have. We need grace. We must come to the throne of grace boldly and say, Lord, I am here. I need Your grace. I am not coming to ask You to give me good things. I am coming to find grace to meet my need. Lord, I cannot go to work or to school without Your presence. Lord, I cannot go to a department store without Your presence. Lord, I need You to stand with me. Come to be my strength. Lord, uphold me and sustain me. ~ Witness Lee

The Pharisees lacked - and what we Christians have all too often lacked - is grace. We must never let our theological disagreements get in the way of showing God's unconditional, overpowering grace to everyone we meet. ~ Justin Lee

I have 'To Kill A Mockingbird' signed by Harper Lee. That is my prized possession. ~ Nancy Grace

The apostle Paul labored more abundantly than all the apostles; yet it was not he but the grace of God that was with him. By the grace of God he was what he was (1 Cor. 15:10). He fulfilled God's purpose in his ministry by enjoying the Lord's sufficient grace (2 Cor. 12:9). Paul surely was drinking of the divine udder to receive the sufficient supply of grace. He did not exercise his natural strength to produce Ishmaels but enjoyed the rich supply of the sufficient grace to bring forth many Isaacs. He lived and worked in the way of "no longer I who live, but Christ" (Gal. 2:20). The real changing of a name is the change from I to Christ - El-Shaddai, the all-sufficient grace Supplier. Only Christ, not I, can fulfill God's purpose. ~ Witness Lee

Whatever mistakes her son might make in life, Cindy was sure God would have mercy on him. The church, she feared, might not. ~ Justin Lee

Stick around long enough, you'll get some grace. ~ Spike Lee

Certainly there are times when God allows suffering and deprives us of the lesser good of pleasure in order to help us toward the greater good of moral and spiritual education. Even the ancient Greeks believed the gods taught wisdom through suffering. Aeschylus wrote: 'Day by day, hour by hour / Pain drips upon the heart / As, against our will, and even in our own despite / Comes Wisdom from the awful grace of God. ~ Lee Strobel

Christianity is different, first, because of grace; second, because it's testable; and third, because it paints a picture that matches the way the world is, in a way that other religions don't. ~ Lee Strobel

When you know in your bones that your body is a sacred gift, you move in the world with an effortless grace. Gratitude and humility rise up spontaneously. ~ Debbie Ford

At Columbia and far beyond, T.D. was renowned and celebrated. At the weekly research seminars I attended ... every speaker felt compelled to focus on him; as they spoke, their eyes fixated only on him, and he let no statement he did not fully agree with pass hi by. No matter who lectured at the seminar, T.D. concentrated intensely on their argument, and interrupted at the first instant something was not satisfactory. At times he broke in on the initial sentence of the talk, refusing to let a speaker proceed until the point was clarified. Sometimes clarification never came; I once witnessed the humiliation of a visiting postdoc who was forced to defend the first sentence he uttered for the entire hour and a half allowed for his seminar. No one dared restrain T.D. ~ Emanuel Derman

Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons. ~ James Lee Burke

on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. ~ Lee Strobel

If we are going to do away with polygamy, it would only be one feather in the bird, one ordinance in the Church and Kingdom. Do away with that, then we must do away with the prophets and apostles, with revelation and the gifts and graces of the Gospel, and finally give up our religion altogether. ~ Wilford Woodruff

To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn't come with guarantees – these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. But, I'm learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude and grace. ~ Brene Brown

I've learned recently to love imperfection a lot because it shines such a big light on God's grace. And if someone has grace for you that's when you feel their love the most and they see you for who you are and they love you anyway. ~ Lacey Mosley

To continue in atheism, I would need to believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, and non-reason produces reason. I simply didn't have that much faith. ~ Lee Strobel

If we give God service it must be because He gives us grace. We work for Him because He works in us. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Because it's in the nature of a gift, the offering and the reception, to create relationship and to overcome that which divides, one can't remain in the way of the gift and also definitively disassociate. When a gift occurs, we see ourselves in others, our very lives sustained by the grace of others, and we find we can hardly hold ourselves apart. The gift occasions communion, that wholeness for which we're all longing in one way or another most of the time. ~ David Dark

The children of the white families in town were not permitted to associate with me, because my father was committing the then unpardonable crime, in Southern eyes, of educating negroes. ~ Lee De Forest

Don't people know that it's the hardest work in the world? Joseph Conrad said that he had loaded hundredweights of coal all day long on a ship in Amsterdam in the wintertime, and that is was nothing to the energy demanded for a day's work writing. ~ Mary Lee Settle

Our Holy Father says every one of us is in need of conversion, beginning with ourselves. We are all in need of the grace of Jesus Christ to receive the Gospel. ~ Joseph Edward Kurtz

President Obama Tastes the Bitter Fruit of Appeasement ... of Israel, not Iran ~ Peter Lee

The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time. ~ Aldous Huxley