Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a tech geek.
Instill respect for teachers.
I have no plans to slow down.
I think literacy is everything.
It's fascinating how life works.
The genius is making a way out of no way.
One must learn how to be black in America.
Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
I didn't feel particularly close to my father.
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.
Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.
Without doubt, President [Barack] Obama is a great historical figure.
No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.
Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.
I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated.
If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.
Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.
It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.
The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.
Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.
My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.
If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.
I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'
That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.
In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?
Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.
So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.