Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

... if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force? What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart, and that attempts to dictate the public career of an honest human body?

We need everybody and all that we are. We need to know and make known the complete, constantly unfolding, complicated heritage that is our black experience. We should absolutely resist the superstar, one at a time mentality that threatens the varied and resilient, flexible wealth of our Black future.

Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis: open, relentless, and on time! She is as radiant, she is as true, as that invincible sunrise she means means means to advance With all of the faith and all of the grace of her entirely devoted life.

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

We are the ones we've been waiting for.