Grace Lee Boggs famous quotes

03-28-2025

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

#Creativity #Responsibility #Past
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

#Connections #Fabric #World
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

#Spiritual #Struggle #Philosophical
We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Wall #Cities #Ivy
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

#Responsibility #Taking Responsibility #Responsible
Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Spiritual #Practice #Community
When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings.
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Jesus #Real #Needs
Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Love Is #Yesterday #Today
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

#Creativity #Practice #Cities
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

#Garden #Community #Levels
What time is it on the clock of the world?
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#World #Clock
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

#Mother #Hate #Long
Don't get stuck in old ideas. Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change.
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Reality #Ideas #Stuck
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

#Creativity #Exercise #People
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

#Jobs #Skills #Imagination
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

#Children #School #Cities
The most radical thing I ever did was to stay put.
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Radical
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

#Spiritual #Sea #People
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

#Struggle #Thinking #Humanity
Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Inspirational #Writing #Ideas
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

#Country #Thinking #Government
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

#Cutting #Past #Self
It behooves our citizens to be on their guard, to be firm in their principles, and full of confidence in themselves. We are able to preserve our self-government if we will but think so. - Thomas Jefferson Too much of our emphases and struggle has simply been in terms of confrontation and not enough recognition of how much spiritual, moral force is involved in the people who are struggling.
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Spiritual #Struggle #Thinking
I believe that we are at the point now, in the United States, where a movement is beginning to emerge.
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Believe #United States #Movement
You don't choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be. And you do choose how you think.
-- Grace Lee Boggs

#Thinking #Want

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