“I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.”

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.

Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

He can’t value you more than you value yourself.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

Being able to laugh got me through.

What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?

I always know the ending; that’s where I start.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

I still feel I am that 14-year-old kid, hungry and trying to find a way through life. That’s what I’m trying to develop, trying to be good at something through boxing. But I feel like that young kid who’s trying and trying.

I look at my children and one thing I’m most proud of, in my heart, are my children.

I ain’t never preyed on the weak. I ain’t never gone and picked on a guy that I knew I could beat up, even as a kid. People wanna make me seem like I’m [that] type of guy.

Forgiveness is that subtle thread that binds both love and friendship. Without forgiveness, you may not even have a child one day.

Ali was a legend of our sport. For me as a kid, he inspired me to represent myself like a champion in and out of the ring.

I really like to please people, and I think it’s a symptom of being an only child.

Hour 36 of labor. I pull at god’s necktie dig a hole at the hospital floor.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.