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" I have never seen a hopeful person join a gang. "

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" 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. "

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

Law Enforcement

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

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

" 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. "

" The powers, conditions, and desires that propel Mexicans and Central Americans into this country are so fundamental, so vast, that no action, legislative or other-wise, can discourage this flight. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People have started to see that 'smart on crime' rather than 'tough on crime' makes sense. "

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

" Showing up in the lives of children is everything. "

" 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. "

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

" I spent the summers of 1984 and 1985 as an associate pastor at Dolores Mission Church, the poorest parish in the Los Angeles archdiocese. In 1986, I became pastor of the church. "

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

" I think that any program that's born from below rather than on high is going to survive. "

" We are less than honest and commit a grave error if we insist that what happened to Rodney G. King was isolated and an exceptional case. The poor know better. "

" Most citizens viewing the tape of Rodney G. King being beaten by police officers were stunned and uncomprehending. Most citizens, that is, but the urban poor. "

Police Officers

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The highest religious and spiritual ideals of any faith would invite us to a compassion for all lives destroyed by the violence that plagues us. "

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

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

" Richard Rohr is a theologian that I read. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "