In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.

I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that is precisely why they are so precious.

Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.

You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets.

To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.

I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.

Serious history was the West, and the West was white.

She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers.

So long as there's been black churches in the United States, there's been a relationship between spiritual well-being and material acquisition. This has always been the case.

I don't have dreams. How can I say it? I myself am a dream.

Don’t ever put your happiness in someone else’s hands. They’ll drop it. They’ll drop it every time.

God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.

We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.

It gives me great pleasure, a good name. I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.

You have to go hunting to know the excitement of seeing someone get their first deer. It's a thrill for them. It is.

I love Love -- though he has wings, And like light can flee.

I drink to excess, I gamble to excess, but everyone knows it, so it's not a big deal.

I wanted to be an actor because it gave me the opportunity to express myself in ways I wasn't comfortable expressing myself, as a kid growing up in St. Louis.