“To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good.”

I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.

I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.

I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.

Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.

They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.

I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.

Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.

Racism is, among other things.

I want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn’t mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it’s not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism .

I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.

Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.

I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver.

The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

An evil intention perverts the best actions, and makes them sins.

All right, your knees may be knocking but that shouldn’t prevent you from going ahead and doing what you need to do.

The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

The sense of form that both had in such high degree prevented much demonstration; but to be with him, do things for him, to admire, and credit him with perfection; and, since she could not exactly wear the same clothes or speak in the same clipped, quiet, decisive voice.

It is no harder for anyone to test this than it is for me to say it is false, since no one is prevented from counting teeth.

Whenever the current of money is forcibly stopped, and when money is prevented from settling at its just level, there are no limits to the possible variations of the exchange.

There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword.