Greg Boyle Quotes

Me, myself, I was a part of gang bangin', you know what I'm sayin'?

I wanted the attention I missed at home, so I became the leader of a gang. That way, I got attention and was recognized as being important. It wasn't a bad gang - you know, in poor districts in New York, there's a gang to every block. We never robbed at the point of a gun; we'd steal potatoes from a grocery store, or crackers.

What people don't understand is joining a gang ain't bad, it's cool, it's fine. When you in the hood, joining a gang it's cool because all your friends are in the gang, all your family's in the gang. We're not just killing people every night, we're just hanging out, having a good time.

I know people in gangs; I could have went down that route.

Whether it is kids carrying knives because they are in gangs or kids carrying knives because they are afraid of gangs, it is the gang culture that underpins the problem.

When you're in a gang, you go through life like any other individual. You have certain obligations, but you are not forced to do anything.

As gang members, as young dudes in the streets, especially in L.A., we're the effect of a situation. We didn't wake up and create our own mindstate and our environment; we adapted our survival instincts.

I lived the street life for a minute; I lost a lot of friends.

Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas.

I was a gang leader. Although, it was a gang for defensive purposes. It was not a gang to sell drugs.

A gang is the same as a wolf pack; gang members do not use their energies in friendship with one another, for they do not know what friendship is. If they are united, it is by the common bond of a desire to attack their world.

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

The fact is that in too many communities in cities in Britain gangs now have become completely rooted into these communities and they destroy them around them.

Some people figure that if they're part of a gang then they have less of a chance of being killed, because they are in larger numbers. But the problem with this is that it will lead to people doing stuff that they wouldn't usually do.

It was a strike against me that I didn't wear baggy jeans and jerseys and that I never hustled, never sold drugs.

We will not rest until being a gang member is a miserable, undesirable life.

I was in middle school right around the time the Bloods and the Crips started taking root in Compton and a lot of the other neighborhoods around me. I saw way too many of my peers - smart, kind, good kids - who got drawn into gangs and violence, and their futures were going to be forever scarred by that.

Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to 'think twice.'

You might go into 'Dope' feeling you already know what this movie is because, all right, there's kids, they're from Inglewood, oh, it's drugs.

Gangs are a part of living in Los Angeles, but you can exist in Inglewood or Culver City or anywhere else, without joining one.

Part of the reason young people are getting involved with gangs, leading to the use of guns and knives, is not the lack of stop and search but the individualistic, consumerist society we live in.

If we grow up in these communities where we have gangs, well, what do you think we're going to belong to? That's what happened to me and what's still happening to hundreds of thousands of other individuals.

The gang culture - tragically - has for some young people become the only source of stability in their lives.

Nahmir is just an idiot. He just glorifies street life. He idolizes it.

Gangbanging is a survival instinct, regardless of how anybody tries to paint it.