“I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.”

If there are kids who want to follow in my footsteps, I’d say that my shoes are too big for them to fill! But their shoe size is just perfect.

Even if you don’t have anything, even if you’ve got a quarter in your pocket, to share with someone else who has nothing really helps.

I’ve never wanted to be put into a box, not musically.

I’m not living large; I just want to live comfortably. I wanna have financial stability that is unshakable.

I promised my mom that if, after a year of putting 150 percent into my career it didn’t work out, I would go back to school. I never did go back.

Life is so much bigger, grander, higher, and wider than we allow ourselves to think.

I didn’t know I had it in me. There’s more to all of us than we realize. Life is so much bigger, grander, higher, and wider than we allow ourselves to think. We’re capable of so much more than we allow ourselves to believe.

I’m proud of everything I do, but I think I’m the most happy about becoming a rapper. It was my entrance into everything. That helped me get into acting.

You have to stand for what you believe in and sometimes you have to stand alone.

If I ran into a 19-year-old version of myself, I’d just tell her to live, full out. I might also tell her to go ahead and have a few babies and not worry about the timing of it.

I never really took any acting classes. I’m just a natural ham, I guess.

Always follow your own path.

I never wanted to give up my power. I wanted to be able to make my own decisions, so that’s why I became involved in management, bottom line.

Sometimes I pray when I really feel like I need God to help me with something, and sometimes we just have conversations. We just kick it.

To wanna be me is to go through not just the good but the bad. You wanna share my story identically? Man, you gonna take some lumps.

We ignore our feelings a lot, I realize. Many of us have to… until they really bite us in the butt.

Would to God that I did stand on the same ground with every other man! This is the first time that I have been permitted to enjoy the rights of a citizen.

Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and pass a law. That’s what democracy is all about. It’s not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That’s flexibility.

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

Opportunity expands when there is excellence and choice in education, when taxes are lowered, when every citizen has affordable, portable health insurance and when constitutional freedoms are preserved.

Conservatives believe in providing Constitutional rights to our citizens, not to enemy combatants like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The army of the sea shall stand before the city, then shall go away for a passage that shall not be very long, as a great prey of citizens shall be holding the ground. The fleet returns. The great emblem recovered.

I certainly think its very important that writers as citizens – not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens – should talk about things that matter to them.