“Passion presented with a greater challenge achieves a greater goal.”

President Obama appears to me to have elevated and implemented the artist-activist concept to the role of empowered servant-leader.

The Emancipation Proclamation…can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

His [Ben Okri’s] work poses very serious questions for the twenty-first century. Among them:

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.

At its most dynamic, faith evolves into powerful applicable knowledge.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope – that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.

In ways that synchronize images, ideas, emotions, sounds, smells, ignorance, and knowledge.

And the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals.

Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy

Often because the attempt to practice it is misunderstood, discouraged, brought under attack, or made a target of willful abuse.

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

By consciously meditating upon spiritual truths and cultivating personal integrity, one need never fear negative circumstances.

The more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.

Although himself frequently a target of guerrilla decontextualization, a major part of the meaning of Michael Jackson’s life was to help balance the accumulation of horrors

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

External silence helps to achieve inner Silence.

There is nothing that love cannot achieve, and there is nothing that love cannot sacrifice.

Once a person has faith, he has achieved everything.

How hard are human beings willing to fight to achieve and sustain justice, equanimity, or joy? And should progress be called such when it devours what is best within the human spirit?

All this needs to stop. And we pledge that Jordan will do its utmost to help achieve it.

All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from the separate approaches every true scholar is striving to descry.

I think the best thing I can hope to achieve is to educate, or make aware, as many people as possible on how the little things they do every day really do affect our environment.