Living for change

As part of the celebration of Grace Lee Boggs in the month of November, we have been reading her autobiography, 'Living for Change' and discussing its meaning and relevance today. Here are some quotes from Grace's autobiography to inspire you to read it yourself!

• “Had I not been born female and Chinese American, I might have ended up teaching philosophy at a university, an observer rather than an active participant in the humanity-stretching movements that have defined the last half of the twentieth century”
  
• “It is only in relation to other bodies and many somebodies that anybody is somebody”
  
• "Truth is always changing, Ortega explained, and yesterday’s truth is today’s error.  Every society lives by a concept of reality and the meaning of life that is based on assumptions.  At a certain point these assumptions are no longer tenable, and the public begins to feel a need for a new concept of reality and the meaning of life”
  
• “The tendency of intellectuals to become so preoccupied with the abstractions necessary for scientific thinking that they lose sight of concrete reality, which is always many-sided”
  
• “Hegel helped me to see my own struggle for meaning as part of the continuing struggle of the individual to become a part of the universal struggle for freedom. Empowered by these ideas, I began to view my unease and restlessness not as a weakness but as a strength, a sign that I was ready to move to a new and higher stage of being”
  
• “From the March on Washington movement I learned that a movement begins when large numbers of people, having reached the point where they feel they can’t take the way things are any longer, find hope for improving their daily lives in an action that they can take together. I also discovered the power that the black community has within itself to change this country when it begins to move”
  
• “History as he told and interpreted it became a weapon in the ongoing struggle because he openly and unabashedly studied the past with a view to creating the future”
  
• “At the same time, CLR emphasized the importance of combining practical struggles with continuing exploration of the most profound philosophical questions because reality is constantly changing and we must be wary of becoming stuck in ideas that have come out of past experiences and have lost their usefulness in the struggle to create the future. So over the years I have always kept my ears close to the ground, testing ideas in practice and listening closely to the grass roots for new questions that require new paradigms. As a result, new unforeseen contradictions have challenged rather than discouraged me, and I have never felt burned out.”
  
• “Living with Jimmy I was constantly reminded of how I had internalized the white liberal and radical view of blacks chiefly as victims and protesters. Jimmy refused to romanticize either workers or blacks and insisted that everyone, regardless of race or class, be held to the same high standards of conduct.”
  
• “Jimmy had an unshakable faith in the ability of humanity to keep evolving. That is why he didn't need to growl. This faith was constantly being nurtured by the poetry and music of the Harlem Renaissance, whose unique optimism has been noted by cultural critics. He was always listening to the music of Duke Ellington and much more inclined to quote Countee Cullen or Langston Hughes than Karl Marx”