Top 116 Quotes & Sayings by Greg Boyle

The truth is this: Brutalized, victimized children invariably will brutalize and victimize when they grow up. Is our only response to this the certain promise that we will penalize them when they do? Or will we commit to keeping our children safe from brutality and victimization?

The mark of our society as civilized will come when we embrace confidence in the power of redemption.

The highest hallmark of a civilized society is not the rapidity by which it exacts vengeance, but its ability to hold victim and victimizer in its compassionate heart.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

The desire of God's heart is immeasurably larger than our imaginations can conjure.

You can't reason with gang violence: you can't talk to it, sit it at the table, and negotiate with it.

Metro police can't infuse hope into those for whom hope is foreign. The algorithm does not exist that can heal the traumatized. Data-driven predictions won't result in the delivery of mental health services.

Reactive and proactive policing are both necessary. Still, we need to lower expectations that such efforts can ever be responsive to crime.

Richard Rohr is a theologian that I read.

The draconian spirit that seeks to enhance penalties and to lower the age at which juveniles will be tries as adults, is part of the 'whole cloth' of three strikes. Our failure to address the depair of our inner-city youth is only delayed by our over-confidence in a stance that is 'tougher than thou.'

The poor evangelize you about what's important and what is the Gospel, and that that's where the joy is.

You are exactly what God had in mind when he made you.

Gang members aren't frightened into acceptable behavior by increased penalties, enhanced punishments, and the promise of new detention facilities.

Delegations from all over the world visit Homeboy Industries and scratch their heads as we tell them of our difficulty in placing our people in jobs after their time with us. Americans' seeming refusal to believe in a person's ability to redeem himself strikes these folks as foreign indeed.

If you are paying attention, then the day is going to be pretty joyful, and a lot of delight will fill it.

Does God feel like that same-sex marriage could happen? I don't think anybody who has a connection to God and God's understanding and depth of compassion who's gonna say 'no.'

I don't save people. God saves people. I can point them in the right direction. I can say, 'There's that door. I think if you walked through it, you'd be happier than you are.'

We need the disruption of categories that lead us to abandon the difficult, the disagreeable, and the least likely to go very far.

I don't believe in mistakes. Everything belongs, and, as the homies say, 'It's all good.'

Abject poverty, political instability, torture, and other abuses push thousands across our border. There is not a deterrent imaginable that equals the conditions that force their migration.

Gangs are bastions of conditional love, and one of the ways to counteract it is to offer community, which will always trump gang, and that's what happens at Homeboy Industries.

We need not wait for further, well-placed home video cameras to see that low-intensity warfare is being waged against low-income minorities. We need only listen to the voices of the poor; they can testify that they are dehumanized, disparaged, and despised by the police.

Even gang members imagine a future that doesn't include gangs.

My job isn't to fix or rescue or to save. It's to accompany, see people, listen to them.

Redemption is possible, and it is the measure of a civilized society.

Don't forget, you are the hero of your own story.

Showing up in the lives of children is everything.

Like the suffering child, gang members act out of their despair, and their actions are all the more alarming now for our not having heeded their cry long ago. The shortsighted neglect that keeps us locked up in our outrage has also kept us from viable solutions.

As much as I dislike the suggestion of single solutions to complex problems, jobs are as close as we will get to a single, effective answer to the enormous problem of gangs.

I would hope that government officials have a healthy respect for the complexity of the gang problem. They should never lose sight of the fact that there are human beings involved. There is no single solution.

God can get tiny if we're not careful.

I kinda don't do guilt. I gave it up for Lent years ago.

The task of dealing comprehensively with gangs belongs to the city, not to law enforcement.

When the vastness of God meets the restriction of our own humanity, words can't hold it. The best we can do is find the moments that rhyme with this expansive heart of God.

The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives.

I wouldn't trade my life for anybody's.

As a society, we come up lacking in many of the marks of compassion and wisdom by which we measure ourselves as civilized.

I'm not always optimistic, but I am hopeful.

No kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang; he's always fleeing something. He's not being pulled; he's being pushed by the circumstances in which he finds himself.

For over twenty years, Homeboy Industries has chosen to stand with those on the margins and those whose burdens are more than they can bear; it stands with the poor and the powerless, with the easily-despised and the readily-left out.

What do we know to be true about gang violence? We know we will fail if we fixate on the symptoms and not address what undergirds it.

Homeboy Bakery is an alternative to kids who have found themselves, regrettably, in gangs and want to redirect their lives.

I do believe in lessons learned. I have learned that you work with gang members and not with gangs; otherwise, you enforce the cohesion of gangs and supply them oxygen.

You prevent kids from joining gangs by offering after-school programs, sports, mentoring, and positive engagement with adults. You intervene with gang members by offering alternatives and employment to help redirect their lives. You deal with areas of high gang crime activity with real community policing. We know what works.

You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

You are so much more than the worst thing you've ever done.

We lose our right to be surprised that California has the highest recidivism rate in the country if we refuse to hire folks who have taken responsibility for their crimes and have done their time.

Our best selves tell us that 'there but for the grace of God... ' and that, in the end, there is no distance, really, between us and them. It is just us. Our best and noble hope is to imitate the God we believe in. The God who has abundant room in God's grief and heart for us all.

I always have a funny story at communion time that underscores that no one is perfect, and that communion is not for perfect people but for hungry people.

I'm the priest who has been mistaken for an ATM machine.

Ours is a God who waits. So who are we not to?

I think not everything that works helps, and not everything that helps works.

I've never met an evil person ever.

All politics are local, and so in church.

There is no such thing as a bad cop, only disturbing and dominant cop thinking that will invariably lead to excessive force and tragic outcomes.

There is no 'them' and 'us.' There is only us.

I have a lot of people in my life, and I think there's something key: the thing that leads to intimacy and relationship and connection is tenderness.

God is compassion.

Homeboy Industries has chosen to stand with the 'demonized' so that the demonizing will stop; it stands with the 'disposable' so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.

Businesses have come and gone at Homeboy Industries. We have had starts and stops, but anything worth doing is worth failing at. We started Homeboy Plumbing. That didn't go so well. Who knew? People didn't want gang members in their homes. I just didn't see that coming.