The difference between the Pyramids in Egypt and the ones in Mexico is there is nothing inside the Mexican Pyramids. In the African Pyramids, the whole inside is a burial chamber. So they were really gravesites to nobility.

There's such a craving to make Egypt white or Asian, people don't just even listen to you. When you explain why would anyone build anything as enduring as the Pyramids in Africa before they would build anything of that nature at home?

Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.

I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.

You walk out in the street, we don't know if we're going to get across. It's a test.

Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.

All life is a test one way or the other.