"Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?"
Read quote
95 likes
Quote collection
June Jordan quotes (page 1 of 5)
86 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We are the ones we've been waiting for."
Read quote
70 likes
"Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth."
Read quote
57 likes
"To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way."
Read quote
57 likes
"Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires."
Read quote
54 likes
"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."
Read quote
52 likes
"Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country."
Read quote
51 likes
"To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty."
Read quote
45 likes
"And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for."
Read quote
42 likes
"Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples."
Read quote
41 likes
"Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do."
Read quote
40 likes
"Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?"
Read quote
38 likes
"Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways."
Read quote
37 likes
"Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?"
Read quote
33 likes
"What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means."
Read quote
33 likes
"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."
Read quote
32 likes
"To tell the truth is to become beautiful."
Read quote
30 likes
"and if i if i ever let love go because the hatred and the whisperings become a phantom dictate i o- bey in lieu of impulse and realities (the blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees) then let love freeze me out. (from i must become a menace to my enemies)"
Read quote
28 likes
"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."
Read quote
28 likes
"If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable."
Read quote
28 likes