Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.

I became more courageous by doing the very things I needed to be courageous for-first, a little, and badly. Then, bit by bit, more and better. Being avidly-sometimes annoy-ingly-curious and persistent about discovering how others were doing what I wanted to do.

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

You will never be able to defend your city while shouting.

Institutionalized rejection of differences is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.