“Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.”

Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression.

I don’t have to live up to that Superwoman myth. I can cry and be human and lean on people who take care of me. That can be very liberating.

The methods of peaceful protests are not capable of being effective, because in reality most people pay little attention to things that are not abrasive.

Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory.

Peace is a rare gift. Peace of mind, peaceful sleeps, and peaceful spirits are all luxuries that few rebels can ever afford.

I believe in life. And I have seen the death parade.

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

I believe in living, I believe in birth, I believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth and I believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, sea sick sailors, can still be guided home to port.

When you go through all your life processing and abusing your hair so it will look like the hair of another race of people then you are making a statement and the statement is clear.

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.

What I’m fighting for now in my work… for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

Dare and the world always yields; or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and it will succumb.

I don’t like favors; they oppress and make me fell like a slave. I’d rather do everything for myself, and be perfectly independent.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

A law against hating Jews is usually the beginning of the end for the Jews.

White Fang knew the law well: to oppress the weak and obey the strong.

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

To the oppressed with no seat on the table; dreaming of change and better days, I will pull up a chair, and light fires in your name.