Grace Lee Boggs

“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.”

“Jimmy Boggs was born in a little town called Marion Junction, Alabama, where there were as many pigs, or more pigs, than even the people. But you know what? People in the South had an understanding that you could make a way out of no way, and that's how they survived.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.'”

“At the core of the problem is an obsolete factory model of schooling that sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies working-class children as if they were products on an assembly line. The purpose of education, I said, cannot be only to increase the earning power of the individual or to supply workers for the ever-changing slots of the corporate machine. Children need to be given a sense of the 'unique capacity of human beings to shape and create reality in accordance with conscious purposes and plans.”

“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 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.”

“I warn you, I'm a terrible housekeeper.”