Eat bread. You don't know if it's been polluted. Drink water, you don't know whether it's been polluted. So living is a test.

Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.

White people think when you love yourself you hate them. No, when I love myself they become irrelevant to me.

What I have learned is that a whole lot of people with degrees don't know a damn thing, and a lot of people with no degrees are brilliant.

If we are going to be masters of our destiny, we must be masters of the ideas that influence that destiny.

Most human behavior is controlled by images. Image is a factor in how people look at themselves and what they use to reflect themselves. The control of images is a major factor in world power.

To be black and beautiful means nothing in this world unless we are black and powerful.

It's time for Black people to stop playing the separating game of geography, of where the slave ship put us down. We must concentrate on where the slave ship picked us up.

We will have taken one giant step forward when we face this reality: Powerful people never teach powerless people how to take their power away from them.

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

Whoever is in control of the hell in your life, is your devil.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor

I never won anything by myself. I was always strong because of help that gave me extra strength to win.

Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.

It was fun to talk too much [as Jebediah Woodley], to keep running your mouth whether the other characters want to hear it or not. That's part of what made this guy fun.

Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.

I'm not a natural ocean person. I married into a family of swimmers, and I've slowly been drawn into the sea.

I have signed a pact with life: we will not get in each other's way

We almost always see only what's wrong with other people and not what's wrong with us.

You have stopped the arrow of time... There's no meaning to this rhyme... Because my song will never mean as much as the one.. He once sang.. For you, yes, you.

Busyness, keeping up with others, hustling hither and yon, makes it almost impossible for an individual to form a heart.