“I can’t do nothin except try to find cloud nine.”

People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

The first part of planning is to believe that you can put that plan into practice.

Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.

We are pregnant with freedom.

Hip Hop can be a very powerful weapon to help expand young people’s political and social consciousness.

A revolutionary woman can’t have no reactionary man. If he’s not about liberation, if he’s not about struggle, if he ain’t about building a strong Black family, if he ain’t about building a strong Black nation, then he ain’t about nothing.

We’re living in a very tricky world, and unless we become analytical and expose the tricknology, people will become sucked into that. It is very easy, it is very, very easy.

This planet is a wonderful place, but a vulnerable place.

Imperialism is the underlying motor of racism. The underlying reason that racism keeps on being promoted in all of its various forms.

I realized that I was connected to Africa.

Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is – never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.

Every person that steps up and commits to social change helps solidify the black movement cause. It is not easy for those who fill in the leader role.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.

We usually reach success by putting the simple truths that we know into practice.

I hate war, and I hate having to struggle. I honestly do because I wish I had been born into a world where it was unnecessary.

I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.

Ever building, building to the clouds, still building higher, and never reflecting that the poor narrow basis cannot sustain the giddy tottering column.

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.

Between holding on and letting go october discerns october knows, that life lurks between the clouds of death and death breathes with every rebirth.

Have Hope. Though clouds environs now, And gladness hides her face in scorn, Put thou the shadow from thy brow, – No night but hath its morn.

I think if you’re an interesting person, you don’t have to cloud yourself in mystery for people to want to know more about you.

In the hour of adversity be not without hope, for crystal rain falls from black clouds.

Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying.