June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.

White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.

I always thought I would die of cancer because my mom and my dad both died of cancer. My dad died of osteocancer, and my mom died of colon cancer.

I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, ‚Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what’s the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?‘

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

I have discovered that my interest in my dear pupil, Mabel, has ripened into a far deeper feeling than that of mere friendship. In fact, I know that I have learned to love her very sincerely.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

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.

For way too long the politicians and people in power have got away with not doing anything at all to fight the climate crisis and ecological crisis.

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.

I’ve taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.

I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Now we’re in the midst of not just advocating for change, not just calling for change – we’re doing the grinding, sometimes frustrating work of delivering change – inch by inch, day by day.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

That’s the one for my tombstone… Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

Wall Street apparently takes and then forgets, and then comes after the guns of law-abiding American citizens and small businesses.

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

It may happen sometimes that a long debate becomes the cause of a longer friendship. Commonly, those who dispute with one another at last agree.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

Wealthy men can’t live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.

I’ve always wanted male friends that I could be real intimate with and talk about important things with and be as affectionate with that person as I would be with a girl.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

I’d like to think I’m a great teacher.

I was a proponent of the ERA. The women of my generation and my daughter’s generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

I am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

If you cry over a guy, then your friends can’t date him. It can’t even be considered.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.

We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.

Never contract friendship with a man that is not better than thyself.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.

As a matter of fact, I didn’t make a political speech outside of my state for 20 years.

I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, and anti-racism.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

I’ll think I have a few wonderful friends and all of a sudden, ooh, here it comes. They do a lot of things. They talk about you to the press, to their friends, tell stories, and you know, it’s disappointing.

The Nation of Islam’s main focus was teaching black pride and self-awareness. Why should we keep trying to force ourselves into white restaurants and schools when white people didn’t want us? Why not clean up our own neighborhoods and schools instead of trying to move out of them and into white people’s neighborhoods?

I believed in God when cancer come to me. Now when I speak, I speak with authority because I’ve been there.

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it’s American or British interests involved.

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.