“The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail… and I’d never heard it before in my life.”

If, in moving through your life, you find yourself lost, go back to the last place where you knew who you were, and what you were doing, and start from there.

Personally I discovered that you could go through the academy as a young scholar, come out, and almost immediately have an impact on the academic environment.

What would you be like if you had white hair and had not given up your principles? It might be wise as you deal with coalition efforts to think about the possibilities of going for fifty years.

If I had been at a University I don’t think I would have been able to have the experience I had in my Smithsonian work. I don’t think I have been as successful

There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.

In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn’t convince other people to really do it. And this year, I’m not running it.

At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.

If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.

I started graduate school in 1971, I started working at the Smithsonian in the festival in 1972. I went full-time at the Smithsonian in 1974. And I got my doctorate in 1975.

If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it’s probably not broad enough a coalition.

I just don’t think one person has that much to contribute to any subject

Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn’t have religion

If every moment is sacred and if you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.

And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs.

I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience

Most people come out of their Ph.D. experience trying to prove themselves, trying to get ahead, trying to get published. You’re scared everybody else is going to do your research and get your topic.

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill revolution, you can jail a liberator but you can’t jail liberation.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.

Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence.

If someone were to harm my family or a friend or somebody I love, I would eat them. I might end up in jail for 500 years, but I would eat them.