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.‘

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

We are a nation founded as a rebuke to tyranny. A nation of revolutionaries who refused sovereign reign from afar. Hear me – we’re a nation that says give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. A nation built on our differences, guided by the belief that we’re all created equal.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

The proper study of mankind is woman.

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

Honolulu is a melting pot.

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

All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.

Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor – over each other.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

Everyone looks at your watch and it represents who you are, your values and your personal style.

I have some good friends of my own who happen to be gay, and when it comes to gay, straight, or whatever, I’m for anything life-affirmative. I’m for gay power, straight power, male power, female power; everybody should feel empowered without oppressing anyone who’s different.

I think where political issues invade moral situations, spiritual leaders have to speak out.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

I’m not for gay marriage, but I’m not for discriminating against people.

To the best of my judgment, I have labored for, and not against, the Union. As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren. I have constantly declared, as I really believed, the only difference between them and us is the difference of circumstances.

Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.

Man can never be a woman’s equal in the spirit of selfless service with which nature has endowed her.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

I think everybody deserves an equal amount of appreciation whether how old they are, but I mean, I’m cool with the praise. I’m good.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

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.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?… It is necessary to accompany them with mercy.

No intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

I believe there is complete equality between men and women. And I believe those passages in the New Testament, not by Jesus, but by Paul, that say women should not adorn themselves, they should always wear hats or color their hair in church – things like that – I think they are signs of the times and should not apply to modern-day life.

Homophobia is real in this country.

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

It’s a well-known fact that tall people are evil.

All movements go too far.

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.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

Only Americans can hurt America.

I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn’t.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

Getting recognized is insane. It just blows my mind. Like, someone who you don’t know at all can just be like, ‚Oh my God – are you Billie?‘

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

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.

The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.