“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 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.

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.

All growth starts at the end of your comfort zone.

All of my life I’ve been growing into who I am in my life today and I am still growing, but I believe in love and nothing can deter me in that.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits to the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

Loving relationships, though necessary for life, health, and growth, are among the most complicated skills.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Imperceptibly the love of these discords grew upon me as my love of music grew stronger.