Quotes from Grace Lee Boggs

I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit.1

The main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality, or an awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe, according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological development over human and community development.

If we want to see change in our lives, we have to change things ourselves.

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.

Look on yourself as a citizen in a kingdom of persons, he advised. Act always as if the maxim of your action could become a universal law, always treating mankind, as much in your own person as in that of another, as an end, never as a means.3

various identity struggles... have also had a shadow side in the sense that they have encouraged us to think of ourselves more as determined than as self-determining, more of victims of 'isms' (racism, sexism, capitalism, ableism) than as human beings who have the power of choice.

In the 1950s I rarely went to a community meeting without Jimmy and would usually just listen or ask questions. Now, having worked in the city and socialized with Jimmy's friends and Correspondence readers for years, I felt I had something to contribute. I was beginning to feel comfortable with the we pronoun, so comfortable that in FBI records of that period I am described as Afro-Chinese.

I was a Chinese American, an ethnic minority so small as to be almost invisible. He was an African American who was very conscious that the blood and sweat of his ancestors had made possible the rapid economic development of this country and who had already embarked on the struggle to ensure that his people would be among those deciding its economic and political future.

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

The Sayings of Confucius: "At fifteen I thought only of study; at thirty I began playing my role; at forty I was sure of myself; at fifty I was conscious of my position in the universe; at sixty I was no longer argumentative; and now at seventy I can follow my heart's desire without violating custom."1

Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.

The physical threat posed by climate change represents a crisis that is not only material but also profoundly spiritual at its core because it challenges us to think seriously about the future of the human race and what it means to be a human being.

I have learned to savor every minute of time with my four year old daughter not only because I know how quickly children grow up but also because I have no idea what state the world will be in when she is my age.

Still, it becomes clearer every day that organizing or joining massive protests and demanding new policies fail to sufficiently address the crisis we face. They may demonstrate that we are on the right side politically, but they are not transformative enough. They do not change the cultural images or the symbols that play such a pivotal role in molding us into who we are.

Transform Yourself to Transform the World

Since World War II, we have known that the old man—the consuming man, the purely technological man, the wholly materialistic man—must die. Our problem has been that no one better has come forward to take his place.

Albeit urgent and overdue, black political power proved to be no antidote to the giant triplets. Racial tensions underlay the low-intensity war between Detroit and its predominantly white suburbs, which became the new base of support for Reagan's militaristic rhetoric. And even as the wealth evaporated in Detroit, materialist aspirations drove a new wave of violence and alienation in city and suburb alike.

They offer penetrating insights into the decay of industrial society, a place where big capitalism has lost all sense of creativity but retains all of its destructive capacities

As Grace argues, echoing author Margaret Wheatley, movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.

As Grace recounts in the pages that follow, Detroit's history is embedded with struggles that expose the contradictions inherent in the golden age. However, the city's deep despair further reminds us that, over the past four decades, the U.S. public has largely evaded responsibility for confronting the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism.

Just coming out of your mother's womb does not make you a human being. - Just getting old doesn't make you wise.

we must view the present period as one of liberation—from the teleological view of progress, from the dehumanization of the industrial age, and from the burdens of empire. This is a period that provides every one of us with the opportunity to participate in a drama of world-historic political and cultural implications.

If you want to make a revolution in the United States, you have to love this country enough to change it.

Drawing on her humanist readings of Karl Marx, Grace urges us to analyze not only the material forms of inequality caused by capitalism but also the dehumanization and spiritual impoverishment inherent in a society dominated by money relations.