“Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.”

Toughest job I ever had: selling doors, door to door.

You can rest assured that if you devote your time and attention to the highest advantage of others, the Universe will support you, always and only in the nick of time.

I’ve been around enough to know what it takes to get a team to reach its potential, and I want players who want to reach their potential.

Every time you see a black romance it’s over-the-top. There always has to be extreme hostility between the sexes. He has to cheat. She has to show him how independently strong she is, not just as a woman but as a black woman.

Education is a right, it’s a journey, it’s a process, and it’s something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.

We just watched this budget debacle right? Seventy-three percent of Americans want to tax the rich. Why can’t the politicians respond to that? Because they are the rich. And they are beholden to the rich. It’s a captured system.

I think Bowe Bergdahl, if he deserted, is a hero – I think throughout history we should build monuments to the unknown deserters.

Imperialism or globalization – I don’t have to care what it’s called to hate it.

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don’t have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and—if you’re not careful—those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.

That’s where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.

The audience is like my instrument. It’s not just me up there, it’s collaborative.

I’m very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.

The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.

If you’re going to help somebody, sneak in, sneak out, do what you can. I just sneak along and do my thing and meet wonderful people, some people I’ve never met, new friends.

The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.

Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.

We have shown that Islam can rule the world perfectly for 14 centuries, and during this time of Muslim power we did not borrow ideas like democracy from others, so why do we need to learn democracy from them now?

Though we love to think that we are civilized & developed than that of people lived centuries ago.

Twentieth-century culture’s disease is the inability to feel their reality.

While it is unlikely that poetry or art shall eliminate the reality of war in the twenty-first century, it is thrilling to know there remain individuals, and even entire communities,

His [Ben Okri’s] work poses very serious questions for the twenty-first century. Among them:

Still willing to invest in art and poetry’s own uniquely explosive contributions to the great, and small, dramas of human history.