I am who I am despite what America has put before me. I am who I am despite the obstacles that we have all faced based upon race and based upon social and spiritual humiliation.
To really know what progress we’re making for children, we have to know how many children we have to begin with. The simple act of counting is an expression of a country’s intent to take care of its people.
The only thing left for Barack Obama to do is to work like a third world dictator and just put all these guys in jail.
Colin Powell’s committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.
I am a man who perceives life in a certain way, a man who rejects things that defecate on humankind, who rejects anything that will not give people room for dissent.
Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development.
Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression.
The sham engineers of the music industry, who steer the wheels of public opinion, are driving the good features of calypso into the ground. I shudder to think what these greedy men will eventually do to this true art form.
You can be arrested and not charged. You can be arrested and have no right to counsel.
I didn’t like The Wiz and it wasn’t because black people were doing it. I didn’t like The Wiz because it was a badly made movie off a classic. Why are you remaking something unless you have something better in mind?
John say’s it’s James who started first, James tells the story in reverse. I drag my belt from off me waist, you should have heard dem screaming round de place.
If you believe in justice, if you believe in democracy, if you believe in people’s rights, if you believe in the harmony of all humankind – then you have no choice but to back Fidel Castro as long as it takes!
The Catholic Church had strict racial attitudes and intolerance for anybody who was not Catholic. When I look at a lot of Black ministers and what went on in the Black church, I was more caught up with those who were in Cadillacs and shiny suits than I was with those who were Kingian in their style.
I come from a sense of struggle, a sense of using the instruments that were given to me to manipulate the environment in which I found myself, and joined up with those who are equally as skillful at manipulating that environment, as was I.
I’m very familiar with poverty. I find it easy to be with, whether I’m in America or in Africa or in Asia. Wherever I go and find the environment of those who are living in poverty and resisting poverty is a great in which I have great comfort.
Poverty continues to exist. Its appearance seems to be relentless in evidencing itself not only to all the things we experience here in America, but certainly what we see globally. And I don’t see anywhere any philosophical analysis that suggests we know how to get out of this.
I think America offers a dream that cannot be fulfilled as easily anywhere else in the world as it could be fulfilled here. Although oppression was common to all of us, those styles of oppression gave us the opportunity to see the world in dimensions we didn’t quite see growing up in any one place.
I’m called a folk singer, and I’m not too sure about that. I went about my life approaching music not from the point of view of a singer, but from the point of view of an actor. That’s how I first started to sing.
Turning against the church I also had to turn against a lot of the teachings of people in my family who were very much of the church and caught in it, and every time I turned to find where resides the good in the church, all I saw was the demonic, the Lucifer of the journey.
After all, Paul Robeson said, ‘Artists are the radical voice of civilization.’ Each and every one of you in this room, with your gifts and your power and your skills, could perhaps change the way in which our global humanity mistrusts itself. Perhaps we as artists and as visionaries, for what’s better in the human heart and the human soul, could influence citizens everywhere in the world to see the better side of who and what we are as a species.
When you grow up, son, never ever go to bed at night knowing that there was something you could have done during the day to strike a blow against injustice and you didn’t do it.