Latest Grace Lee Boggs Quotes from Interviews

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• I think when every household in almost every neighborhood can produce what it needs without going through the market, we're going to undergo a huge change in the elevation of the community to the center of the city, and the elimination of the factory.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, Community, Neighborhood

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, Revolution, Victim

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our souls rather than our economy. 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. And I think there's a great human desire for solutions, for profound solutions - and that nothing simple will do it. It really requires some very great searching of our souls.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Simple, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Thinking, People, Growing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, Voting, Calling

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, People, Soul

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Humanity, Recognizing, Nonviolence

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Thinking, Government, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  People, Humanity, Enemy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, Years, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Suicide, School, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Grace Lee Boggs

  People, Giving, Leader

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The idea of protest organizing, as summarized by community organizer Saul Alinsky, is that if we put enough pressure on the government, it will do things to help people. 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. But with globalization and the weakening of the nation-state, that kind of organizing doesn't work.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Strong, Government, Ideas

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, Ideas, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think that education today is a form of child abuse. The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Children, Thinking, Abuse

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Powerful, Thinking, Light

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Thinking, People, Transition

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Hunting, Light, Agriculture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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. The things that are happening in Detroit would amaze you if you're used to only looking at statistics, and only thinking of blacks as sufferers and not as activists.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Jobs, Children, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Cities, People, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Jobs, People, Alternatives

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think most people do not imagine how things can change. In Detroit, there are community gardens that are only an indication that the country is coming back to the city. And that is something that actually is necessary to stop the real imminent danger of the extermination of our planet.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Country, Real, Garden

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air it would hit an autoworker on its way down. A few years after that, if you threw a stone in the air it'd hit an abandoned house or a vacant lot on its way down. And most people saw those vacant lots as blight. But meanwhile during World War II, blacks had moved from the South to the North. And they saw these vacant lots as places where you could grow food for the community. And so urban agriculture was born.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  War, Agriculture, Air

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Thinking, Detroit, Ends

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The standardization and specialization of industrialization was being undermined by globalization. When people in Bangladesh could produce things much more cheaply than anybody could produce them in Detroit, we no longer were the world capital of industrialization.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  People, Industrialization, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com