“We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.”
“Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.”
“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.”
“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”
“The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.”
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.”
“My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.”
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
“One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”
“My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.”
“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.”
“While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.”
“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
“All great achievements require time.”
“My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.”
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.”
“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
“I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands you need to be able to throw something back.”
“Life loves the liver of it.”
“There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.”
“At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.”
“Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: 'I'm with you kid. Let's go.'”
“If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.”
“If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.”
“Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.”
“The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”
“As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.”
“All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.”
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
“The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”
“While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man's humanity to man.”
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”
“There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.”
“For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”
“Nothing will work unless you do.”