“Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.”

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Instead of going to the gym, I dress in black – a lot more practical and much more fun.

Shades of black intertwined in my being I try to see in color but darkness is all I’m seeing.

I can adapt to any environment or any situation I need to, so I am ready to go to Russia. You take what you get or start crying about it, but I am re-doing ‘Rocky IV.’ I am doing the black ‘Rocky.’

As blacks, all we got is sports and entertainment. That’s the only way out the hood sometimes.

I believe every pencil has to be sharpened every now and then to stay sharp, or you dull out. So my records, I chose to speak on what black people do, what white people do, what women do, what men do.

I found my old diary tonight. A brokenness I had forgotten pen pressured so deep it punctured page. I ran my fingers over my words and there inside ridges black I found a little girl desperate for someone to save her, desperate for the very woman I have become.

I can’t have brown hair for some reason. I don’t think it goes with my skin tone. The second I see it turn brown in the sun, I dye it black – the blacker the better.

Since I was 16, I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression.