I think that you're just as close to Jesus if you use the equipment he gave you other than to call on him to do for you what you can do for yourself.

As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.

The impact of racism has changed our look at ourselves because basically racism was meant to make us look unfaithfully at ourselves, and to not treasure our institutions.

Our concept of beauty is taken from Hollywood, which is anti-black. We don't see ourselves as beautiful in most cases. Although we are naturally one of the most beautiful peoples out there, we don't see it. We don't get the point. Hollywood sets the standards.

Violence among all people is based on dissatisfaction, frustration and crushed ambition and people who don't know who to strike at and who to blame, and not willing to blame themselves.

In a collective society, everybody's business is everybody's business.

I could pull all kinds of games on my mother. I couldn't pull any games on my father.