I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be.

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.

You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.

If I can be a leader, I will.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

There’s a lack of people in power that are motivated by the idea of helping people.

When fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade.

Never forget the three powerful resources you always have available to you: love, prayer, and forgiveness.

In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.

If you’re too big to fit into fashion, then you just have to do your own fashion.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

These men ask for just the same thing, fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as in my power, they, and all others, shall have.

Women fight for democracy and engage in the world. But they shouldn’t try and be copying men and be masculine; they should anchor on the home and build on those fundamentals.

My mother had a saying: ‚Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last.‘

Over the holidays, and even during filming, I realized that I actually like my body, even if it’s not perfect according to the book. I just feel sexy. For the first time, I don’t want to get rid of the curves. I just want to tone it up. My body is comfortable, and it’s not unhealthy, so I’m going to rock with it.

I want my fans to love themselves. It’s almost like I want to hypnotize them so when they hear my music they love themselves instantly.

It’s empowering to know I am doing something, I am taking a stand, I am disrupting.

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.

It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

Either you run the day or the day runs you.

Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.

He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‚I’m possible‘!

There are a lot of good women in New York.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.

Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.

I said on the equality side of it, that it is essential to a woman’s equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

I have too many fantasies to be a housewife. I guess I am a fantasy.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

I’m not a centerfold.

What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing.

Never was it given to mortal man – To lie so boldly as we women can.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

Blacks, especially in America, have been raised with a slave mentality – they don’t feel that they have the right to speak as loud as possible.

I’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

I was raised to be independent.

If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.

There is no man on Earth or devil in Hell who can keep you from the very best God put in you.

The more successful I become, the more I need a man.

I am my own sanctuary and I can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence in one’s ability, one can build a better world.

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

Most of us are raised to believe we are ordinary. The anchor of the universe is present in every child. A parent only needs to guide and step aside and let them fulfill their dharma. Help children remember that they can do or be anything.

When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.