Explore Quotes by Geoffrey Canada

You don't need someone destroying you when your own people are the worst messengers possible. And this is what black people in America have not come to grips with.

The rates of soda consumption in our poorest communities cannot be explained by individual consumer preferences alone, but rather are linked to broader issues of access and affordability of healthy foods in low-income neighborhoods, and to the marketing efforts of soda companies themselves.

It's just becoming more acceptable for girls to react violently.

You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.

My contract with my teachers is fair, and is two pages. The union contract is 200 pages. You cannot manage your business when you cannot make any decision without going back to 200 pages worth of stuff.

At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.

Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words.

When I first found out that Superman wasn't real, I was about maybe eight. And I was talking to my mother about it. And she was like, 'No, no, no. There's no Superman.' And I started crying. I really thought he was coming to rescue us. The chaos, the violence, the danger. No hero was coming.

Middle-class families know education begins at birth.

The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work.

It is important to have permanent safe spaces in Harlem.

When I began working in not-for-profits, it was taking a vow of poverty, which eliminated huge numbers of folks.

The system decides you can't run schools in the summer.

Movies portray men as tough guys.

Lots of boys pick strong messages about who they are and who they want to be from the media.

People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don't understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street.

I want my kids to graduate from high school. But that's not enough. I also want them to go to college. Why? Because rich people's kids go to college. And if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for my kids. Because you know what? College graduates don't tend to go to jail as frequently as nongraduates.

Teachers need to be paid like professionals.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't draw on my undergraduate background in psychology.

People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.

My own faith was nurtured by my grandmother and her clinging deeply to her faith when she was dying a painful and slow death from cancer.