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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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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
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Revolution
Thinking
Seen
Life
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People
Another
Power
Transitions
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Mode
Looks
Transition
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More quotes by 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 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
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
I think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our souls rather than our economy.
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
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
I think it's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change.
Grace Lee Boggs
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
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
The most radical thing I ever did was to stay put.
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
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
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
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
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
A rebellion is something that is developing as an explosion coming out of the righteous grievances of a community of people.
Grace Lee Boggs
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
Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas.
Grace Lee Boggs
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
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