If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.
Greg BoyleRead
We can't get at crime unless we know what language it speaks. Otherwise, we are just suppressing the cough, not curing the disease.
Interpretation
Understanding the root causes of crime is essential for effective solutions.
Greg Boyle emphasizes that addressing crime requires deep insight into its underlying language and causes. Merely applying temporary solutions is insufficient; true reform involves understanding and tackling the fundamental issues that lead to criminal behavior, much like treating a disease rather than just its symptoms.
In practice
In a speech about community safety strategies, a leader might quote this to emphasize the need for root cause analysis.
If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.
Relapse happens, especially when you're dealing with folks who are frankly the least likely to succeed based on their own pasts and difficulties. We can work with the most likely to succeed. I'm not interested in that.
We ought not to demonize a single gang member, and we ought not to romanticize a single gang.
Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to 'think twice.'
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.
The idea that any law enforcement agency or person would ever know these gang members better than Homeboy Industries is impossible.
There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.
The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as - it is as if he has killed all mankind.
Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. .... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.
Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.
Where there is nothing, there is God.
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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