A Negro woman has the same kind of problems as other women, but she can't take the same things for granted.

Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has overcome to reach his goals.

Progress comes from caring more about what needs to be done than about who gets the credit

Civil rights are civil rights. There are no persons who are not entitled to their civil rights... We have to recognize that we have a long way to go, but we have to go that way together.

When you're a black woman, you seldom get to do what you just want to do; you always do what you have to do.

Without community service, we would not have a strong quality of life. It's important to the person who serves as well as the recipient. It's the way in which we ourselves grow and develop.

We've got to work to save our children and do it with full respect for the fact that if we do not, no one else is going to do it.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights.

My mother helped me understand how not to show off what I knew, but how to use it so that others might benefit.

If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time.

No one will do for you what you need to do for yourself. We cannot afford to be separate. We have to see that all of us are in the same boat.

All death matters.""Only to the living.

Like vanishing dew, a passing apparitionor the sudden flashof lightning -- already gone --thus should one regard one's self.

What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?

Work smart, not hard

If an urn lacks the characteristics of an urn, how can we call it an urn?

I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.

I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.

Music is the voice of God traveling through ten-dimensional hyperspace.

I'm always excited to do the fight scenes.

Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery: nothing else holds fashion.