Amazing Grace Quotes

“A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives...”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“Evil exists," he says, not flinching at the word. "I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher would call evil. Somebody has power. Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help people-that is my idea of evil.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“A dream does not die on it's own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives.The motive may be different, and I'm sure it often is; the consequence is not.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“Still, I think it grieves the heart of God when human beings created in His image treat other human beings like filthy rags.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“Children long for this—a voice, a way of being heard—but many sense that there is no one in the world to hear their words, so they are drawn to ways of malice. If they cannot sing, they scream. They are vessels of the spirit but the spirit sometimes is entombed; it can’t get out, and so they smash it!”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“When they pray, what do they say to God?”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“I want to correct something I told you once,' she says. 'You asked me once if I thought white people wish that Puerto Rican and black people would just die or go away. I thought it over and I changed my mind. I don’t think they wish that we would die. I think they wish that we were never born. Now that we’re here, I think they don’t know what they ought to do. I think that that’s the biggest problem in their minds about poor people.' She adds politely, 'I’m not talkin’ about all of the white people. Some of them feel this way. Some of them don’t. Some of them don’t feel nothin’. Some are nice people but they can’t get nothin’ done and so they put it out of mind.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“People who know but do not act do evil too. I don’t know if I would call them evil but they’re certainly not thinking about heaven.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“I can say it, but it doesn’t seem convincing to most people. I can call it an ‘injustice,’ but that doesn’t always sink in either. You have to understand the nature of the culture in New York. Words that are equal to the pain of the poor are pretty easily discredited. A quarter of the truth, stated with lots of indirection, is regarded as more seemly.

Even when people do accept the idea of ‘injustice,’ there are ways to live with it without it causing you to change a great deal in your life. A mildly embarrassed toleration of injustice is an elemental part of cultural sophistication here. the stile is, ‘Oh yes. We know all that. So tell us something new.’ There’s a kind of cultivated weariness in this. Talking about injustice, I am told, is ‘tiresome’ unless you do it in a way that sounds amusing.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“When I had asked Mrs. Flowers how she held up in the face of all the death and violence within her neighborhood, she had given me a simple answer: “This family talks to God.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“I believe that the wilderness is where God is found.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“A four-year-old says, “My mommy lives in heaven. Her eyelashes go down instead of up because she is … in heaven, but I miss her.” She feels consoled that her mother “is with God,” who, she says, “has pink whiskers, red hair, and two feet.… I did not want her to die until I died. I think I am going to die too in a little while.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“MEET MR. HIV,” writes an 11-year-old child, over a diamond-shaped face from which six scaly legs extend. “He invades your body. This is what he looks like when he does,” another child writes over a scary-looking monster that resembles a tarantula. An HIV-infected 12-year-old draws a transparent yellow picture of his body filled with hairy, bloblike creatures that resemble paramecia and amoebae. “I hate you because you do bad things to my body,” writes another boy. “Go pick on someone your own size.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“That is the great luxury of long-existing and accepted segregation in New York and almost every other major city of our nation nowadays. Nothing needs to be imposed on anyone. The evil is already set in stone. We just move in.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“Segregation, he concluded, “is neither sought nor imposed by healthy … human beings.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation