Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I warn you, I'm a terrible housekeeper.
What time is it on the clock of the world?
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 rebellions arise out of anger, and they're very short-lived.
You don't choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be.
This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old.
Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.
Nonviolence is essentially based on recognizing the humanity in every one one of us.
I think it's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change.
Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after
I think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our souls rather than our economy.
I believe that we are at the point now, in the United States, where a movement is beginning to emerge.
Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas.
Finding the leaders of the future is a question of recognizing those people who give leadership in a crisis.
We're at a great transition point in terms of population, demographics, and what it means to be a human being.
I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people.
I think Detroit shows that we've come to the end of the industrial epoch and have to find a new mode of production.
A rebellion is something that is developing as an explosion coming out of the righteous grievances of a community of people.
Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.
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.
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 don't know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but we might be able to imagine it if your imagination were rich enough.
The nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization.
You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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. And a revolution has some sense of a long time frame, millions of years that we've been evolving on this planet.
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.
When I was growing up, Asians were so few and far between as to be almost invisible. And so the idea of an Asian American movement or an Asian American thrust in this country was unthinkable.
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.
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.
When I came to Detroit, if you threw a stone up in the air and it came down, it would hit an autoworker because the Chrysler Jefferson plant where my husband worked was very close also to where we lived.
Well, I would say that we've got to redefine democracy, that we have been stuck in concepts of representative democracy, that we believe that it's getting other people to do things for us that we progress.
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.
I think Detroit is already providing a model for change in the world. I think that Detroit - I mean, people come from all over the world come to see what we're doing. People are looking for a new way of living.
I think we have to rethink the concept of “leader.” 'Cause “leader” implies “follower.” And, so many- not so many, but I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for.
I think that's a very important part of what we need in this country, is that sense that we have lived through so many stages and that we are entering into a new stage where we could create something completely different.
I was working with C. L. R. James; I believed in Marxist ideas about the labor and movement and the workers being the secret to the future. And I learned differently just by being in Detroit and being married to Jimmy Boggs.
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.
It's really important that we get rid of the idea that protest will create change. 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.
Some people are afraid of gentrification, but what I see is young people want to live in a different world. And they see possibilities here. They see that rents are relatively cheap compared to places like New York and California.
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.
I had no idea what I was gonna do after I got my degree in philosophy in 1940. But what I did know was at that time, if you were a Chinese-American, even department stores wouldn't hire you. They'd come right out and say, 'We don't hire Orientals.'
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.