R.K. King Quotes

Of all the old maid's blessing, the greatest is carte blanche. Spinsterhood is powerful; once a woman is called "that crazy old maid" she can get away with anything.

As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

If you are a blackman in America and get stopped by the police, make sure you have a vidio camera. Don't rely on some passerby to film the beating. Rodney King was just lucky.

Create your legacy, and pass the baton.

Nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

It is very hard to be a female leader. While it is assumed that any man, no matter how tough, has a soft side... and female leader is assumed to be one-dimensional.

I think younger players probably just think they are who they are-they don't think about coming out. Unless you're number one in the world, nobody cares, usually.

Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.

You don't get nothing from sleep but a dream.

You can't talk to a man, with a shotgun in his hand.

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.

The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.

You must believe the unbelievable, snatch the possible out of the impossible.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal "Once upon a time.

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

The process of nonviolence is one that takes time and those of us who've suffered, who've been persecuted over the years, would like to see things change, you know, overnight.

To write is human, to edit is divine.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

It is cheerful to God when you rejoice or laugh from the bottom of your heart.

Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

They were close to the end of the beginning . . .

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

It's best to be ruthless with the past.

I wanted to use sports for social change.

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

I stay in tune with my family and God.

If we have an honest discussion on whether the war on poverty should be fought with welfare or with economic growth in the private sector, Democrats will lose black votes.

Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate?

I've spread my legs in the backseat in a creative sense quite a few times.

he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

Critics don't buy records. They get 'em free.

Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.

Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust.

...maybe the world needs a cadre of smartasses to liven things up, who knows?

I want to live a full life - period.

I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me. I think we tend to write out our phobias.

There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.

Death is when the monsters get you.

If you do something, expect consequences

Life is like a motion picture, everything is like a movie. In one of my rhymes I say, "My life is like a movie/Directed by King Louie".

Without peace and without the overwhelming majority of people that believe in peace defending it, working for it, believing in it, security can never really be a reality.

The professor, instead of being the "sage on the stage," functions as a "guide on the side."

In business, everything starts with integrity. Otherwise it falls apart, though it does take time to find out who has integrity.

I will tell you King's First Law of Recognition: You never get it when you want it, and then when it comes, you get too much.

I am the living attestation of the American dream. I am the extolment of this great nation.