“When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.”

In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.

When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.

I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, say what it is you don’t like.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

Charity is the opium of the privileged.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.

And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.

Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too – If one says no to the other, let his wing break.

No man however great is greater than his people.

The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.

The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.

Every generation must find its mission and fulfill it, as Fanon said – or betray it. So it is not something that you can write up on the wall, saying this is what has to be done. Every generation has to discover what it needs to do.

Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.

We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break.

If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

I’ve been in that situation many times before – where I’m losing and I have to knock a guy out.

People striving, being knocked down and coming back… this is what builds character in a man.

I do this ‘Walker shake.’ You got to get knocked down many times, shake it off. Life is about ups and downs, and you got to keep standing up.

If you get knocked down – setbacks in life, like applying for a job if they don’t hire you – keep trying, keep getting up, keep doing it.

The unsaid rule for living in a trailer park is: ‘If the door’s shut, don’t come a-knockin.’ But if it’s open and you’re walkin’ by, feel free to say, ‘Hello.’

I’d love to go into WWE and have a real knock and see what’s what.

Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.