We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

As I think about anyone or anything -- whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film -- as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?

Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

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.

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

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.