Back home the black women are all beautiful

The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That's how I see it. Otherwise, I don't know why you do it.

A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.

There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you

The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.

My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

In America, black is a country.

I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.

There is no depth to education without art.

Thought is more important than art....To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.

All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other

Falling in love is one of most beautiful emotions one can feel. You haven’t lived your life, if you haven’t loved.

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

... he wasn't crying for the woman who had died. He was crying for the woman she had been.

Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror

Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

Stripe really did come about because we were really appalled by how hard it was to charge for things online.

What I'm now discovering - and I'm now in another decade - is that the older I get the more I have my self knowledge which makes me feel more sexy.

I am here and you will know that I am the best and will hear me. The color of my skin or the kink of my hair or the spread of my mouth has nothing to do with what you are listening to.

We have no filter for music, but we feel it when what's being spoken and sung is telling a story and evidencing a character.