Greg Boyle Quotes

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Greg Boyle

Profession : Clergyman

Birth : May 19, 1954

I feel called to be faithful.

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

Me wanting a gang member to have a different life would never be the same as that gang member wanting to have one.

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

The idea that any law enforcement agency or person would ever know these gang members better than Homeboy Industries is impossible.

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

Gangs are born of a lethal absence of hope, and hope has an address: 130 W. Bruno St. in Los Angeles, CA 90012.

Greg Boyle

Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez - these are people whose thoughts are so important.

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

We are among the handful of countries that has difficulty distinguishing juveniles from adults where crime is concerned. We are convinced that if a child commits an adult crime, that kid is magically transformed into an adult. Consequently, we try juveniles as adults.

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle

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

Greg Boyle

What is ultimately compelling for our children in helping them conjure images of a future for themselves is our willingness to walk with them as they do it.

Greg Boyle

We need a pope to oversee not simply a modernization of the church but its total transformation.

Greg Boyle

The church needs a pope who can call us to conversion and lead us to take seriously what Jesus did.

Greg Boyle

We can't just settle for the low bar of pope as media-savvy, canny Curia manager.

Greg Boyle

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.

Greg Boyle