"To begin is no more agony than opening your hand."
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Quote collection
June Jordan quotes (page 3 of 5)
86 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter."
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"Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law."
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"Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine."
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"To believe is to become what you believe."
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"A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak."
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"So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders."
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"That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes."
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"As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry."
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"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."
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"The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se."
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"Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important."
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"In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal."
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"If any of us hopes to survive, she must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic."
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"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."
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"If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here."
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"Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis: open, relentless, and on time! She is as radiant, she is as true, as that invincible sunrise she means means means to advance With all of the faith and all of the grace of her entirely devoted life."
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"Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying."
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"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."
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"One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!"
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