“Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.”

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

You are your own stories.

I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

He wants to put his story next to hers.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race – scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct, it has a social function, racism.

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake – otherwise it just walks on in your door.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

Passion is never enough; neither is skill.

My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilitie s; it’s choosing the ones you want.

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.

I have only one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity.

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.

The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.

Government’s great contribution to human wisdom is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.