Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?
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.
Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people’s formulations of what’s important.
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.
My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn’t be fair.
To believe is to become what you believe.
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!
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.
I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.
The courts cannot garnish a fathers salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.
As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.
Sometimes we become so sophisticated we have to read the New York Times in order to figure out whether it’s a hot or a rainy day.
I am working never to be late again.
The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what’s given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.
The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity – the incredibly outgoing energy – of righteous rage.
Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.
What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?
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.
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.
As I think about anyone or anything – whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film – as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?