“There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.”

I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn’t have each other you had nothing.

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.

Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

He can’t value you more than you value yourself.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity.

Reserve the language of sculpture for the art of sculpture. Lest you confuse beauty with the shape of a jaw or art with the size of a stomach.

We are not trapped in what the science of management says we can do. We are capable of doing what the art of leadership says is possible.

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.

Failures often become art. And art can never fail.

Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.