In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.

At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty4 to the republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.

He's never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme.

And I was booked once to go on 'Ed Sullivan' and I got bumped and ran out the back door crying.

That [Exodus] occurred, I have no doubt.

We put the wrong emphasis on what beauty is and what health is. Health is being vibrant and having energy and being happy.

Wonder Showzen is one of my favorite shows of all time. When I first saw it, I thought it was so funny and new and original and edgy and insane and subversive. I didn't know comedy could do that.

God, the Master Weaver. He stretches the yarn and intertwines the colors, the ragged twine with the velvet strings, the pains with the pleasures. Nothing escapes his reach.

The Process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality.

Oh my God," he said. "A kind word from Rose Hathaway. I can die a happy man.

Barack Obama makes more gaffes than George Bush and Sarah Palin combined and is never called on it.