“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity.”

What you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not.

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.

I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine.

It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

I am bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.

In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.

We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about survival and growth.

Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .

In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.

We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.

The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.

I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we’re complicated.

Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.

In Harlem, I got all my black friends. But when I go downtown, I got black, white, Asian, Indian friends. There’s no borders, no barriers.

I have low self-esteem and I always have. Guys always cheated on me with women who were European-looking. You know, the long-hair type. Really beautiful women that left me thinking, ‘How I can I compete with that?’ Being a regular black girl wasn’t good enough.

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And ev’n with Paradise devise the snake; For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blackened – Man’s forgiveness give and take!

But when I see a story on welfare on television, they only show black people.