Michelle Wu Quotes

Every young person deserves to grow up in a city with wide open spaces that coax our legs into running—that remind us to breathe deep and look up at the sky.

And as we marched through Dorchester that day, I saw in the eyes of every proud coach, and teammate, and day-one supporter—the spirit that burns bright in every corner of Boston…The grit, & courage, and deep sense of community that drives us to overcome the impossible—for the people we love and the place we call home.

If there's anything more exhausting than having to battle for our basic human rights, it's letting them go without a fight.

It can feel surreal and stressful, exhausting and empowering—it feels like the most important work in the world. But more than anything, it feels like a gift: To be able to get up every day and go to work for the city I love with people who love it, too. People unafraid to do things differently—willing to meet crises with creativity, and reach deep in the dirt to pull up the roots of the challenges that block our view of the sky.

There is no statute of limitations on addressing wrongs that we have the ability to make right.

Together, we can build a Boston that’s more green than concrete. Where housing is a given, not a godsend, and mobility is the minimum, not a miracle. Where the things we build inspire—but don’t define—us; and where each generation shines brighter than the last.

We are proud to have the oldest police force anywhere in the country to have been known nationwide for innovations that focused on community, building community trust, and shifting the dynamic away from arrests and punitive measures and more towards community relationships... We should be demilitarizing the Boston police in weapons and tactics, and interactions with community. We should be reining in ballooning overtime for the police — a part of the city budget that has been eating into other necessary investments. And we know this is tied to the underlying contract, and it’s not just about slashing a line item because that has failed. It has been a show, a political statement, but then ended up setting up the city to overspend, because overtime hours must be paid out by contract and by law, no matter what the budget line item is. And we also need accountability for misconduct or misuse of force, and again, this is tied into the underlying police contract.

If we want Boston to be a thriving, competitive, global city...we can’t continue to sabotage ourselves by taking a piecemeal, reactive, bare-minimum approach to public transit.

My family and so many others were able to come to this country to raise their kids in a land where they believed we'd have a shot at leading better lives than they'd ever had because of generations of Black leaders. Leaders who gave their lives to the pursuit of freedom and justice for everyone—and many who had their lives taken by people who feared that equality for all would expose the mediocrity of some.

Justice for all means reproductive justice, gender justice, queer justice. Liberty for all means the all-inclusive freedoms that guarantee every person agency over their own body.

A city that's scared is not a city that's safe. A land ruled by fear is not the land of the free.

None of us should have to be resilient to systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, any kind of harm being done to our communities. We shouldn't have to be resilient in the face of violence, or hunger, or homelessness. Resilience, and our ability to survive injustices, are never reasons to stop fighting for justice.

Freedom is not a thing that we have, but a thing that we do.

Boston is not a city that takes our rights lightly. Here in the birthplace of revolution, we have always, always fought for each other. We're damn good at it.

This is about bringing leadership from every community to the forefront. In my time on the council, I've seen that when you work in coalition, when you follow the lead of community members, the ideas that are put forward can happen at the city level and can be implemented pretty immediately.
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Everything that I do is shaped by the experiences that I've had with my family and that I've heard in families all across the city who share the same struggles and dreams. I am a daughter of immigrants, someone who never thought I would be running for office when I was a young girl. And I get my resilience from seeing the challenges that my parents faced as immigrants to this country who came here with nothing.
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We're actually building a movement here to connect with the real history of Boston, our legacy as a city that has always stood up for what is right, fighting for those systemic big picture changes, even when the odds are slim.