Quote collection
353 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people."
"So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex."
"For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am. And that's why, when I say I'm a blues man, that's a very serious vocation - to muster the courage to find your own unique voice, to forge your distinctive style in the world, to leave your imprint in the sands of time in such a way that your singularity, your individuality, remains something that people have to come to terms with."
"We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions."
"Wealth inequality has increased."
"Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope."
"When you love people, you give them a priority. You have a sense of urgency about their pain."
"You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust."
"I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural."
"Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something."
"In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people."
"All individuals have the same value, not to be determined by market price. They're made in the image and likeness of God."
"The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people."
"We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms."
"The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they're on the road to freedom and that means they're gonna run up against the powers that be."
"Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence."
"Education is soul crafting."
"I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself."
"When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period."
"When it comes to our precious poor children of all colors, maybe disproportionally in percentage black and white and red, but all colors, yellow as well as white, we need to push toward integrated schools."