J. B. Pritzker Quotes

When you grow up in an extended family, or in a stable neighborhood with two or three generations of families who live there, you feel seen. Not just the good things you've done, the stuff you put on your resume. You know they've seen you in your dark times, when you've messed up - but they're still there.

We knew the people in Natick and knew the teachers that would be teaching our children. It was important for us to be involved in the Natick community because we think so highly of it.

Studies have shown that inmate participation in education, vocational and job training, prison work skills development, drug abuse, mental health and other treatment programs, all reduce recidivism, significantly.

Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.

I wish that every community from which individuals go to prison might have an organization which would be notified when they are returned to society. It would then be this organization's responsibility to find these individuals a job, suited to their capacities and training, which would bring them a decent living.

Most importantly, I realize the value of the other people - the extended family - the other people within my community, my cultures: my teachers and the other people I call Auntie, Uncle, Godfather, Godbrother, whatever. These are people who pulled you in and made you part of their lives and their homes.

People bring up Willie Horton or some other political bombshell in the past, but what they're not being intellectually honest about is if we do not work on early release, if we do not rehabilitate 95 percent of the people who go into the prison system and come out, far more innocent people are going to be harmed.

Religious people are simply following major core practices of happy people. For example, one benefits from the guaranteed social support that can be found in a church, synagogue, or mosque.

A lot of people in the African-American community are raised by grandmothers, and that relationship is a special bond and circle.

There's definitely a way to fix the prison system. First of all, you gotta get a rehabilitation center in prisons, that every inmate must go through.

I think that we need to begin talking about what does it mean to create these safe spaces in our communities, to begin welcoming one another into our homes and into our communities when they're returning home from prison, people who are on the streets. We need to begin doing the work in our own communities of creating the kind of democracy that we would like to see on a larger scale.

All is well with him, who is beloved of his neighbours.

When you come from where I come from, if anyone in the family makes it out, the others kind of come with you.

But anyway, it's obvious through human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we can do without vitamins or essential minerals.

How can we know the true meaning of charity if we don't even know how to help those closest to us?

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

I wonder about prisoners. They're told, "You are free, you are innocent, you can go anywhere." I'm sure they usually feel nothing. They don't burst into tears or hysterics or joy or "I told you so." It's nothing. To be on the straight path isn't a bloody thing. It's just ordinary.

I feel like I've got it together when things are going well with my family.

If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. … We’re going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if you’ve made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.

Unhealthy cultures create addiction. Healthy cultures create social bonds.

We leaned on family, church, school, friends and sports. That's basically all we had. All those things really shaped my life and shaped me musically. It's why I write the way I do.

It's cool because you get to see that some of these women are there because they should be. They're actually not good people to be in society. And then, other people are there because they just made a really retarded mistake.

All are interconnected...the environment; rights of the dying; care of caregivers; education and medical care for peoples of the Himalayas; prison work; those living on the margins of society, particularly kids.