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" In my barrio, jobs work and money saves lives. When I have had the funds to place a gang member on a job site and pay his salary, I've seen him stop banging. When, on the rarest of occasions, an employer has offered a job to one of these youth, I've witnessed kids suddenly have a reason to get up in the morning. "

Greg Boyle

Morning

Money

Job

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

" God is compassion. "

Greg Boyle

Compassion

God

" The arms of God reach to embrace, and somehow you feel yourself just outside God's fingertips. "

" We ought not to demonize a single gang member, and we ought not to romanticize a single gang. "

" 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. "

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

Greg Boyle

Lead

Call

" I've never met an evil person ever. "

" 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. "

" We don't need a specialized gang unit. We need patrol officers who specialize in knowing their community. "

" Young people can change and grow. Every parent knows that. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It has become an accepted tenet that kids will rarely listen to their parents but seldom fail to imitate them. Communicating the message has never been a good substitute for 'showing up' and embodying the message. "

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

" 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. "

" As much as I dislike the suggestion of single solutions to complex problems, jobs are as close as we will get to a single, effective answer to the enormous problem of gangs. "

" 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. "

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

" If the Los Angeles Police Department had enough officers, it could focus on one part of the community and stay there long enough to know and respect the people the officers are called on to protect and serve. "

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

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

" Even gang members imagine a future that doesn't include gangs. "

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

Greg Boyle

Disruption

Difficult

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

" I kinda don't do guilt. I gave it up for Lent years ago. "

Greg Boyle

Years

Kinda

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

" 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. "

" Children find themselves adrift not because the informational signposts are illegible, but because there is no one around to guide and accompany them. "

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