Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

That which could hunger, could starve.

It's when people begin using their religion as just a way of getting power over other people that scares me. I'm afraid that's what's going on in a lot of cases right now. When people deliberately tell lies, Creationism for instance, and pretend, "Oh, it's not really religion." I mean they know they're lying, and yet they're the religious people. There's something wrong there.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

Beware At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease