Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It’s a form of spiritual emptiness.
You’ve got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it.
Black people have always been America’s wilderness in search of a promised land.
As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.
It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.
You can’t talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it’s precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.
There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.
Education is soul crafting.
For me music is central, so when one’s talking about poetry, for the most part Plato’s talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.
Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent.
For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice.
The black agenda, from Frederick Douglas to Ida B. Wells to Martin King, has always been the most broad, deep, inclusive, embracing agenda of the nation.
We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification – be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.
Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak – that gives it an existential emphasis.
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.