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.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

A true friend encourages us, comforts us, supports us like a big easy chair, offering us a safe refuge from the world.

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

My lawyer has been a good friend of mine for a long time. He and I continuously have conversations.

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

A lot of Jews are great friends of mine.

In football, I don’t have a lot of friends. The people who I really trust, there are not many… Most of the time, I’m alone.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

I always have been an activist for things that were just authentically a part of my life, that I felt connected to.

Over the years, all my coaches and my teammates have contributed a lot to shape my career. I can never forget their contribution and help.

Prayer is simply talking to God like a friend and should be the easiest thing we do each day.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

Even an animal, if you show genuine affection, gradually trust develops… If you always showing bad face and beating, how can you develop friendship?

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: ‚What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.‘

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

My family’s lineage, we are warriors. The McGregor clan, we are warriors all through. We are famous all through the world for our fighting capabilities of all generations. So I have no doubt that’s stood to me and that led me down this path and gave me what I have.

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they’re looting, if you see a white family it says they’re looking for food.

We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

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

I personally have always been in favor of people who are gay being permitted to marry legally – and I still feel that way.

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It’s like my friend, almost.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

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.

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

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.

A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‚race‘ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

Friendship, like credit, is highest when it is not used.

No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.

We can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

A friend doesn’t go on a diet because you are fat.

That old law about ‚an eye for an eye‘ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

Often people become our friend or follower with an undercurrent of resentment in our having more success than they have. They secretly desire the opportunity to take us down a notch; they have a nose for any misstep on our part they can exploit.

Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?

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

If you want to appeal to everyone, you can’t do a world tour and expect black people to show up at every date – when you’re in Australia, when you’re in Dubai, when you’re in Indonesia.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

Friendship is essentially a partnership.

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

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.