Be an outcast. Be pleased to walk alone.

Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

I could never live happily in Africa-or anywhere else-until I could live freely in Mississippi.

Our problem mostly in our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they're empty and they can't get enough because they're - you know, it's that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly.

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'