Civil Rights Activist Quotes

“I think that each of us is so much alike, and yet at the same time we are so different, and I have a feeling that if you encountered difficulty, and I with my age encountered the same difficulty, I would respond one way, and you would respond another. Neither would be right or wrong. It's just that each of us is courageous, and that's what I encourage, courage, and the courage to see, and the courage to say to oneself what one has seen. Don't be in denial.”

“I like chicken a lot because chicken is generous - that is to say, it's obedient. It will do whatever you tell it to do.”

“Moderation in all things. And even moderation in moderation. Don't get too much moderation, you know?”

“The future is plump with promise.”

“In a magazine, one can get - from cover to cover - 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.”

“You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.”

“I did work in a strip club, but I didn't strip. I danced, and I became very popular.”

“It is very dangerous to make a person larger than life because, then, young men and women are tempted to believe, well, if he was that great, he's inaccessible, and I can never try to be that or emulate that or achieve that.”

“It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.”

“Have a purpose to your life: Purpose does not mean having a job...You can have a job and still be unfulfilled.”

“We need language to tell us who we are, how we feel, what we're capable of- to explain the pains and glory of our existence.”

“Raising kids is like nailing Jell-O to a tree.”

“Everyone grows old but not everyone grows up.”

“I'm a descendant of someone bought and sold, and brought in 1619 in what was to become the United States.”

“Everything costs and costs the earth.”

“You can see in others what they don't see in themselves and what the world doesn't see in them.”

“Time itself is an individual gift. It is wise to cherish it carefully and give it away generously.”

“Now, after years of observation and enough courage to admit what I have observed, I try to plant peace if I do not want discord; to plant loyalty and honesty if I want to avoid betrayal and lies.”

“I like to go back and read poems that I wrote fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and sometimes they surprise me - I didn't know I knew that then. Or maybe I didn't know it then, and I know more now.”

“A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.”

“The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change.”

“Bitterness is cancer - it eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure.”

“I try to see every day as a celebration.”

“You can't use up creativity, creative thinking builds on itself and increases the creativity of the thinker...You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

“Hope does not take away your problems. It can lift you above them.”