Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

The absence of unconditional self-love has led many people to sell themselves cheap.

Use your hater to make you greater!

While keeping an open mind, beware, politicians will gladly fill it with garbage.

A lot of people listen to podcasts because they want to learn something and be entertained along the way.

There may come a time in the career of every sociologist when it is his solemn duty to raise hell.

I take full responsibility here and now for everything I experience, for it is my own programming that creates my actions and also influences the reactions of people around me.

So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and human history is mostly the story of error and accident.

Defending yesterday is far more risky than making tomorrow.

There is a good deal in a man's mode of eating.

We are going to have a huge Oscar issue, you are going to see everything in such beautiful detail.