Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.

— June Jordan

June Jordan Quotes

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.

— June Jordan

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people’s formulations of what’s important.

— June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan

To believe is to become what you believe.

— June Jordan

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!

— June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan

I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.

— June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan

As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.

— June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan

I am working never to be late again.

— June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan

The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity – the incredibly outgoing energy – of righteous rage.

— June Jordan

Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.

— June Jordan

What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?

— June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan

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.

— June Jordan

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?

— June Jordan
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