Grace Lee 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

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

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

Someone has to remember. ~ Lisa Roecker

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

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

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

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

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

I believe in the complexity of the human story and that there's no way you can tell that story in one way and say, This is it. Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing; the same person telling the story will tell it differently. I think of that masquerade in Igbo festivals that dances in the public arena. The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place. The masquerade is moving through this big arena. Dancing. If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world's stories should be told - from many different perspectives. ~ Chinua Achebe

Devington could clearly ascertain by the end of the second lap that Slug was decidely undermanaged by his indolent jockey, and the high-strung Hawke was incontrovertibly terrized by his ... By the end of the final lap of the arduous run, Lord Uxeter had completely used up his horse, and Slug had completely uased up his rider!
... Devington seized the moment to claim the lead, murmuring low to Rosie, It would appear, my lovely girl, the race is ours. ~ Emery Lee

I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy's and her sister Lee Radziwill's families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship. ~ Jonas Mekas

I think the Internet was the saving grace for Public Enemy. Before that, travelling the world saved Public Enemy. ~ Chuck D

May the Lord restore your soul. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Jean Louise Finch always made this journey by air, ~ Harper Lee

I think people have always loved things that are bigger than life, things that are imaginative. ~ Stan Lee

Giver of life, the Holy God. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music. ~ Eddie Van Halen

A new grace for a new life is what we need in the coming year. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Grace thinks of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. She took something for herself when Jes offered her that first cigarette, and again with her photographs at Holy Communion. And look at her: she's ended up staying so much longer than she ever thought she'd be allowed to. ~ Zan Romanoff

I like blue a lot, and greens. Earthy blues and greens. ~ Lee DeWyze

Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll's head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her. Already Laila sees something behind this young girl's eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila's salvation.
The little girl looks up. Puts the doll down. Smiles. ~ Khaled Hosseini

The Man of Sorrows is now anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows. Returned in triumph from the overthrow of all his foes, he offers his own rapturous Te Deum in the temple above, and joys in the power of the Lord. Herein let every subject of King Jesus imitate the King; let us lean upon Jehovah's strength, let us joy in it by unstaggering faith, let us exult in it in our thankful songs. Jesus not only has thus rejoiced but he shall do so as he sees the power of divine grace bringing out from their sinful hiding-places the purchase of his soul's travail; we also shall rejoice more and more as we learn by expeience more and more fully the strength of the arm of our covenant God. Our weakness unstrings our harps, but his strength tunes them anew. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Anyone who fucks with you is going to be wearing their insides on the outside when I'm done with them. ~ Trina M. Lee

It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply. ~ A.W. Tozer

Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. I'll not willingly offend, nor be easily offended. ~ Bruce Lee

those children to work while Tom's in jail. If ~ Harper Lee

If you read the Scriptures, you know thy Creator and thy soul. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Try fighting with your head for a change ...
it's a good one, even if it does resist learning. ~ Harper Lee

The answer to this riddle has a hole in the middle,
And some have been known to fall in it.
In tennis it's nothing, but it can be received,
And sometimes a person may win it.
Though not seen or heard it may be perceived,
Like princes or bees it's in clover.
The answer to this riddle has a hole in the middle,
And without it one cannot start over. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart

Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn't underneath it ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Just rest and soon enough, you'll be home. I assured her as she slowly closed her eyes and the smile on her face faded. ~ Grace Fiorre

He recognizes the moving parts in a complex situation, sees how the pieces fit together, and devises the most appropriate response, considering not just the military element but also the economic and political aspects of a problem. "He'd see the necessary integration of the tools of American power, not just military power," Lee Hamilton says. "And he had a keen sense of the limitations of military power."8 ~ Bartholomew Sparrow

It's a terrible person who listens to what we say rather than what we mean ~ F.D. Lee

Mutating state and asynchronous programming are very hard to get right. ~ Lee Campbell

Chrysler invented rebates, I'm sorry to say. I didn't have anything to do with that. A lot of flaky deals were made in order to give the customer enough cash for a down payment. ~ Lee Iacocca

On Drinking Alone by Moonlight


Here are flowers and here is wine,
But where's a friend with me to join
Hand in hand and heart to heart
In one full cup before we part?

Rather than to drink alone,
I'll make bold to ask the moon
To condescend to lend her face
The hour and the scene to grace.

Lo, she answers, and she brings
My shadow on her silver wings;
That makes three, and we shall be.
I ween, a merry company

The modest moon declines the cup,
But shadow promptly takes it up,
And when I dance my shadow fleet
Keeps measure with my flying feet.

But though the moon declines to tipple
She dances in yon shining ripple,
And when I sing, my festive song,
The echoes of the moon prolong.

Say, when shall we next meet together?
Surely not in cloudy weather,
For you my boon companions dear
Come only when the sky is clear. ~ Li Bai

Occasionally you can hear her howl, when the sky is black and the moon is full. ~ Melody Lee

Keep your hands on the break hoods or about a thumb's length from the stem on either side of the bar. You will have more control, breathe easier, and stay loose. ~ Brett Lee Scott

I'm not the sort of writer who can plan out things. Mostly I have no idea where I'm going. ~ Chang-rae Lee

'Red Hook Summer' is another chapter in my chronicles of Brooklyn. ~ Spike Lee

Antipater, in a letter written upon the death of Aristotle, the philosopher, observes, "Amongst his other gifts he had that of persuasiveness"; and the absence of this in the character of Marcius made all his great actions and noble qualities unacceptable to those whom they benifited: pride, and self-will, the consort, as Plato calls it, of solitude, made him insufferable. With the skill which Alcibiades, on the contrary, possessed to treat every one in the way most agreeable to him, we cannot wonder that all his successes were attended with the most exuberant favour and honour; his very errors, at time, being accompanied by something of grace and felicity. And so in spite of great and frequent hurt that he had done the city, he was repeatedly appointed to office and command; while Coriolanus stood in vain for a place which his great services had made his due. The one, in spite of the harm he occasioned, could not make himself hated, nor the other, with all the admiration he attracted, succeed in being beloved by his countrymen. ~ Plutarch

We are justified by faith and saved by grace. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Based on Tor, which is what they all use. Which was written by the United States Naval Research Laboratory, ironically. To provide a safe haven for political dissidents and whistleblowers, all around the world. Which is the law of unintended consequences, right there, biting the world in the ass. Tor stands for The Onion Router. Because that's what we're dealing with here. Layers upon layers upon layers, like the layers of an onion, in the Deep Web itself, and inside all of its separate sites. ~ Lee Child

I was always interested in the possibility maybe of finding my way into a big adventure. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart

The means of choice:
She might choose to ascend
The falling dream,
By some angelic power without a name
Reverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,
Know height without an end,
Density melt to air, silence yield a voice
Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace. ~ May Sarton

Empower me to be a bold participant, rather than a timid saint in waiting, in the difficult ordinariness of now; to exercise the authority of honesty, rather than to defer to power, or deceive to get it; to influence someone for justice, rather than impress anyone for gain and, by grace, to find treasures of joy, of friendship, of peace hidden in the fields of the daily you give me to plow. ~ Ted Loder

He's freed himself from every stigma, but he sits nursing his hangover of hatred ... . ~ Harper Lee

Yet how hard most people work for mere dust and ashes and care, taking no thought of growing in knowledge and grace, never having time to get in sight of their own ignorance. ~ John Muir