The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.
A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.
You can’t talk about truth unless you talk about yourself.
I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.
I think hip-hop can be prophetic and progressive, and at the same time, the dominant forms tend to be homophobic, misogynistic and something that we need to critically call into question.
Jesus loves a free black man.
Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.
Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people’s culture and working people’s culture and so forth.
I think that when we talk about education I was also blessed to talk with my dear brother Arne Duncan. I had never met him, the secretary of Education. We had a wonderful talk. And I had told him quite explicitly education is a right, it’s not a race to the top.
You can’t have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.
There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.
Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it’s ethically driven.
We must never so thoroughly disrespect someone that they are beyond the pale and, therefore, have no possibility of being changed.
Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
When you love people, you give them a priority. You have a sense of urgency about their pain.
I try to, in my own fallible way, speak the truth.
All you have is a gift a to give.
For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it’s constitutive of who I am.
We’ve been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It’s been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.
To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.