Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

The key to being a successful pastor is to be able to minister supernaturally, be a pastor without tears, in learning of Him, learning from His life.

One side of the street is a Church; across the road is a liquor store. Both of 'em keepin us poor.

The development of a tree depends on where it is planted.

I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.

Sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks.

I'm not real impressed with the Star Trek weaponry, I gotta be honest.

A bureaucrat's idea of cleaning up his files is to make a copy of every paper before he destroys it.

Television exposes the world to the accident. The world is exposed to accidents through television.

I would like to start by calling bullshit.