“There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.”

I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people, and I should stick to the issue of racial justice.

When aroused the American conscience is a powerful force for reform.

Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life.

If you give your life to a cause in which you believe, and if it is right and just, and if your life comes to an end as a result of this, then your life could not have been spent in a more redemptive way. I think that is what my husband has done.

I’m fulfilled in what I do. I never thought that a lot of money or fine clothes – the finer things of life – would make you happy. My concept of happiness is to be filled in a spiritual sense.

If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children.

If sexual relations between consenting adults are not part of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution, then American democracy is in trouble.

Violence diminishes our humanity.

A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.

Because Dr. King was human and not divine – although we think he was divine, he was just a man, an extraordinary man, but a man – and he would get depressed from time to time and disappointed about all kinds of things relative to the movement.

It’s going to take an act of Congress to deal with poverty and hunger, not only in this country, but throughout the world. We have the resources but we don’t have the will.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn’t as good as a white child.

Behind every good man, there’s a good woman reminding you I knew you when you didn’t have nothing.

Nonviolence first changes the individual.

We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.

History teaches us that unity is strength, and cautions us to submerge and overcome our differences in the quest for common goals, to strive, with all our combined strength, for the path to true African brotherhood and unity.

The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class.

If a strong government finds that it can, with impunity, destroy a weak people, then the hour has struck for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment.

Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment.

History is the record of human progress, a record of the struggle of the advancement of the human mind, of the human spirit, towards some known or unknown objective.

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.

First black president ever, and to be living while it happened – that’s a good part of history. That’s probably the biggest person I admire right now.

Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.