Quote

How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?

Grace Lee Boggs

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Grace Lee Boggs
Age: 100 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 27
Died: 2015
Died: October 5
Activist
Author
Civil Rights Advocate
Non-Fiction Writer
Politician
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Ria Stone
City
Percent
Cities
Redefine
Millions
Ensuring
Education
Drop
Ends
Prison
School
Thus
Children
Inner

More quotes by Grace Lee Boggs

Image
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
Image
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.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
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.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
I think our concept of revolution, in terms of getting the power to do things, is too focused on the state. We have a scenario of revolution that first, you know, comes from 1917, that first you take the state power, and then you change things. And we don't realize it's collapsed.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
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
Image
I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
New York has become almost a third-world country. When I was growing up it was mostly a Euro-American country. And it wasn't until LaGuardia was elected in 1933 that Italians were even considered Americans. We're at a great transition point in terms of population, demographics, and what it means to be a human being.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
Nonviolence is based on recognizing that all of us are human beings. And at a certain point we begin to learn that you don't gather very much by making enemies out of people and not recognizing their humanity. Nonviolence is essentially based on recognizing the humanity in every one one of us.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
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
Image
People in Detroit aren't just urban gardening. They're starting a new mode of education. They're trying to give children the education to be solutionaries rather than people who are going to get jobs in the system. And that is a huge change, a cultural revolution.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
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
Image
A rebellion is something that is developing as an explosion coming out of the righteous grievances of a community of people.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
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
Image
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.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
I first understood the changes that were necessary in this world, because the waiters in the restaurant, when I cried, used to say, Leave her on the hillside to die. She's only a girl baby. I think they said it somewhat as a joke, maybe not, but it made me understand that being born female in this world was very different from being born male.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
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.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
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
Image
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.
Grace Lee Boggs
Image
Wage work is disappearing. I didn't make the jobs disappear, but they have disappeared. And people are forced to be looking for other alternatives.
Grace Lee Boggs