Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

The titanic effort that has brought liberation to South Africa, and ensured the total liberation of Africa, constitutes an act of redemption for the black people of the world.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

It’s a disgrace that we have millions of people who are uninsured.

Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

You know what, I’d done an interview show when I was like 16 or 17. One of my first jobs. I did interviews for this television show in Toronto.

When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like, ‚Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.‘

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

We don’t want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful – not only to that member of the community but the entire community.

A strong man doesn’t have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn’t match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.

My goal is just to be respected as a man when I walk down the street with my family. I don’t care what your job is, you’re not gonna talk down to me, you’re not gonna try to get a rise out of me. I’m a man first. And in establishing that, some interesting things have happened.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

‚Whole Women’s Health‘ made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.

Everyone does things differently on offense. Everyone’s goal is to score points.

I love diversity.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in that we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters – two beautiful, intelligent black young women – playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

The U.S. military was segregated ‚til the Korean War, and the blacks in World War Two were totally segregated.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

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

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

Today different ethnic groups and different nations come together due to common sense.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

And we have done more in the two and a half years that I’ve been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it’s ending ‚don’t ask, don’t tell,‘ making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples.

I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said – and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded – ‚It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.‘ This was a very healthy attitude.

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

When a father puts in long hours at work, he’s praised for being dedicated and ambitious. But when a mother stays late at the office, she’s sometimes accused of being selfish, neglecting her kids.

Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Science is global. Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, has to reach everywhere. Science is a beautiful gift to humanity, we should not distort it. Science does not differentiate between multiple races.

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.

One of the things that we’re trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren’t all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

Me, as a person, I grow. I’m like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

Let’s be clear about this, and let’s be clear: we should not be creating incentives to house people in prison. We should be creating incentives instead to shut the revolving door into prison.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don’t think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.

Where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world.