Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. When you sustain that kind of affront, and sustain it and sustain it and sustain it, something happens to you. You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board.

I think people involved with institutions find it harder to know the time to go than the time to come.

I was really worn down by an American society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely self-satisfied.

We all have to die, and I preferred to have just one death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without response is to die many deaths.

One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery.

Americans don't bother to notice anybody else in the world.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison.