As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

To believe is to become what you believe.

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.