I'm not romanticizing black people, because we've got gangsters like everybody else.

If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf.

The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.

I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

There is no organizations and institutions that are worthwhile in terms of fighting for and dying for unless there is some individual integrity and character and virtue that is at work within various individuals in those institutions especially their leaders.

Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.