Greg Boyle Quotes

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Greg Boyle

Profession : Clergyman

Birth : May 19, 1954

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.

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

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.'

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

Richard Rohr is a theologian that I read.

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem.

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not 'about something.' It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.

Greg Boyle