“History always seems to repeat itself.”

Discrimination based on skin color, sexual orientation,& gender needs to stop. We’re all humans at the end of the day.

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?

Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group.

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender.

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it’s perhaps far more terrible than it’s ever been.

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing.

You can’t criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.

No march, movement, or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners in this quest for equality can be considered a positive step.

I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

I am a part of history whether people want to take it seriously or not.

The prolonged slavery of woman is the darkest page in human history.

Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.

I’m obsessed by the idea of making my mark on history. And Arsenal is my paradise.

The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the Cold War, is that the engine of capitalism – the individual – is mightier than any collective.