Grace Lee Boggs Quotes

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.

You don't choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be.

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.

Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after

Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas.

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.

Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.

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

The only way to survive is by taking care of one another.

I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people.

What time is it on the clock of the world?

I believe that we are at the point now, in the United States, where a movement is beginning to emerge.

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.

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?

We're at a great transition point in terms of population, demographics, and what it means to be a human being.

I think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our souls rather than our economy.

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.

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.

The nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization.

A rebellion is something that is developing as an explosion coming out of the righteous grievances of a community of people.

I think it's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change.

I think that rebellions arise out of anger, and they're very short-lived. And a revolution has some sense of a long time frame, millions of years that we've been evolving on this planet.

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 Detroit shows that we've come to the end of the industrial epoch and have to find a new mode of production.

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.

Nonviolence is essentially based on recognizing the humanity in every one one of us.

Finding the leaders of the future is a question of recognizing those people who give leadership in a crisis.

I'm not calling for a boycott on voting. But I think it should be very clear that just voting is not going to solve our problems.

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.

This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old.

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?

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.

I think that rebellions arise out of anger, and they're very short-lived.

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.