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The most radical thing I ever did was to stay put.

Grace Lee Boggs

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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
Radical
Stay
Ever
Thing

More quotes by Grace Lee Boggs

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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
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I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people.
Grace Lee Boggs
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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
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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.
Grace Lee Boggs
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Grace Lee Boggs
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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
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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
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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
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Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.
Grace Lee Boggs
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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
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I think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our souls rather than our economy.
Grace Lee Boggs
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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
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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
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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.
Grace Lee Boggs
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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
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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
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A rebellion is something that is developing as an explosion coming out of the righteous grievances of a community of people.
Grace Lee Boggs