“Black history won’t stop no bullets.”

That’s what art is for me. It helps you maintain hope by giving you the ability to either create outside your reality, or to describe your reality.

Please remember that my great grandmother was a slave. My grandmother was a sharecropper. My mother was a factory worker.

I wake up every day and think everything sure is awful, but then I ask the Lord what I can do to make it better.

I might be the only one who’s never taken a dime from my son.

We need to read history from the source.

Anger is an all-consuming fire that will burn you and everyone else around you. Where is the justice in that?

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement was about getting to know your culture, your history. I know all about my history.

I spent 43 years of my life in anger and I know what it can do… Now I pray a lot. I do whatever I need to do to keep me out of that anger, out of that place where I can’t grow and be better.

I have never one day been ashamed of my son. Even when he was not right, that’s ok.

People can like him or not like him individually. But I need for them to know that he was a person of substance, and he was worthy, and he was a good son and a good brother and a good participant in the community.

I’m not a filmmaker. I’m not a music producer by choice.

Nelson Mandela’s contribution to the people of South Africa has been immeasurable and I look forward to helping with his work all over the country.

Revolution is Tupac showing a young artist that he can scribble in a notebook and it’s worth a lot.

I read every agreement of every contract. Anything I put my signature on, I really do read them. And I find things.

For me, revolution is around young people with no skills, college education, and coming from everywhere having an economic impact on an entire system which no one notices.

All we ever wanted was for Tupac to have the opportunity to tell his story.

I don’t like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

In the gates of eternity the black hand and the white hand hold each other with equal clasp.

I saw for the first time the earth’s shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. The feelings which filled me I can express with one word-joy.

We ought even to hold as a fixed principle that what I see white I believe to be black, if the superior authorities define it to be so.

We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.

If you have the power to see things through somebody else’s eyes, it’s like going from black and white to color or two dimensions to three dimensions.

It could have been worse. I could have been born black.