I worked, studied, mothered and continued to be an activist. I found that Cuba was much different from the US; its government was genuinely trying to erase racism.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

We need to be weapons of mass construction, weapons of mass love. It's not enough just to change the system. We need to change ourselves.

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is....never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.

Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.

I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless, robots who protect them and their property.

Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.

Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression.

Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.

To become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

Whenever you see the fear and sadness, be there the source of love and kindness.

But there were worse things than disappointment, and I'd lived through several of them already.

Blessing is essentially the transformative experience of knowing and honoring God as the Giver

Most of the artists I know are crazy in one way or another. I think that's why you get into it. You're in pursuit of a certain sort of peace that's very, very, very difficult to come by.

When I'm married I want to be single, and when I'm single I want to be married.

The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together.

Women do not forget. Women do not forgive.

Persuasion, indeed, is a kind of force. It consists in showing a person the consequences of his actions. It is, in a word, force applied through the mind.

You have to smile, if you expect anybody to smile back.

Session work makes you more strict. You can't hit notes all over the place. You've got to make each one really count.