“Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.”

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.

The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.

Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.

We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift.

No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.

No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.