“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.”

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.

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.

This planet is a wonderful place, but a vulnerable place.

Imperialism is the underlying motor of racism. The underlying reason that racism keeps on being promoted in all of its various forms.

I realized that I was connected to Africa.

Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is – never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.

Every person that steps up and commits to social change helps solidify the black movement cause. It is not easy for those who fill in the leader role.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.

We usually reach success by putting the simple truths that we know into practice.

But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child — a true self who is waiting.

Lesbian and gay people are a permanent part of the American workforce, who currently have no protection from the arbitrary abuse of their rights on the job.

If you have a few hundred followers and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you Pope.

He had hurt her beyond abuse, and now she doesn’t let his name also pass through her mind.

It doesn’t matter if you are a man or woman; you need to stand up for yourself. If you have been abused, you deserve justice.

As you know, I get a lot of abuse on Twitter. And while I’m abroad on training camp, I train three times a day, often for two hours a time, and I haven’t got time to respond to all the people that ask questions.

Wendy Malick and Valerie Bertinelli make fun of me, but I take care of my health – I don’t abuse it.

If anyone wants to abuse other people for whatever colour, race or creed they are, then it’s just stupidness, isn’t it?