Quote collection
353 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I love my gay brothers. I love my lesbian sisters. I love my transvestite, my gender-bending folk. For me, it's a matter of embracing their humanity, allowing them to choose in such a way that they are in the driver's seat regarding their lives."
"As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive."
"liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms."
"Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it."
"When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself."
"The American Dream is individualistic. Martin Luther King's dream was collective. The American Dream says, "I can engage in upward mobility and live the good life." King's dream was fundamentally Christian. His commitment to radical love had everything to do with his commitment to Jesus of Nazareth, and his dream had everything to do with community, with a "we" consciousness that included poor and working people around the world, not just black people."
"Martin Luther King was a victim of surveillance, and had great solidarity with victims of surveillance."
"Prophetic pragmatism attempts to keep alive the sense of alternative ways of life and of struggle based on the best of the past. In this sense, the praxis of prophetic pragmatism is tragic action with revolutionary intent, usually reformist consequences and always visionary outlook."
"The evil is so ubiquitous in terms of objectification of all of us, that one can say that almost about any TV and even radio show."
"Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don't think that the words are necessarily nullified. It's just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of."
"You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself."
"You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly."
"We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice."
"I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it."
"The capitalist culture of consumption... does not provide meaningful sustenance for large numbers of people."
"In the practice of radical love, you are embracing human beings across the board, but you do give a preference - very much like Jesus - to the least of these, to the weak, to the vulnerable. That includes poor whites and poor browns, as well as the poor in black ghettos."
"The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak - that gives it an existential emphasis."
"He who learns death unlearns slavery."
"Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence."
"Being a Christian is not a political orientation for the president, but he is a centrist."