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Grace Lee Boggs Biography

Grace Lee Boggs

Grace Lee Boggs (June 27, 1915 – October 5, 2015) was an American author, social activist, philosopher and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s she and James Boggs, her husband of some forty years (he died in 1993), took their own political direction. By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press.

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Grace Lee Boggs Quotes

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.

People, Humanity, Enemy, Nonviolence, Human, Beings

The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists - as starting revolutions - does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much America was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments.

Thinking, America, Ideas, Spark, Folks, Understand

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.

Cutting, Evolution, Past, Self, Short, Stories

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.

Children, Cultural, Give, Jobs, Thinking

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

Community, Developing, Grievances, People, Rebellion, Righteous

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

Powerful, Light, Revolution, Wake, Become

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.

War, Thinking, Important, Raising, Forcing

Actually, if you go back to what Marx said in The Communist Manifesto over a hundred years ago, when in talking about the constant revolutions in technology, he ended that paragraph by saying, "All that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air, and men and women are forced to face with sober senses our conditions of life and our relations with our kind. " We're at that sort of turning point in human history.

Air, Human, Marx, Men, Technology, Turning

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

Mean, Point, Population, Terms, Transition

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

Thinking, Rebellion, Arise, Anger, Think

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

Detroit, Ends, Industrial, Mode, Shows, Thinking

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.

Choose, Live, Think, Thinking, Times, Want

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.

Confrontation, Guard, Jefferson, Spiritual, Struggle, Thinking

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.

Thinking, Revolution, Victim, State, Prisoners, Led

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.

Change, Humanity, People, Sea, Spiritual, Values

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

Believe, Movement, Point, United, United States

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.

Children, Detroit, Education, Jobs, People, Urban

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.

Hate, Long, Matter, Mother, Oppressed, Oppressor

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.

Cities, Creativity, Ongoing, Practice, Respiriting, Shift

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

Change, Ideas, Old, Reality, Recognizing, Stuck

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