D. Simone Quotes

Does she realize she looks like a sunflower, ready to rain sunlight on all who look down upon her?

You've got to learn to leave the table When love's no longer being served".

I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.

Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.

You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.

Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it

There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

The worst thing about that kind of prejudice... is that while you feel hurt and angry and all the rest of it, it feeds you self-doubt. You start thinking, perhaps I am not good enough.

This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.

Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking.

It's a new dawn, it's a new day...and I'm feeling good.

You don't have to live next to me / Just give me my equality.

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

I made wine from the lilac tree/Put my heart in its recipe/It makes me see what I want to see/And be what I want to be

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.

All oppression creates a state of war.

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.

When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.

I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.

There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.

I feel what they feel. And people who listen to me know that, and it makes them feel like they're not alone.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

To be young, gifted and black!

If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.

It's here, where absolute evil was perpetrated, that the will must resurface for a fraternal world, a world based on respect of man and his dignity.

Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. For each of them, love would be the revelation of the self through the gift of the self and the enrichment of the universe.

I'm a real rebel with a cause.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.

I'm just human, I have faults like anyone

I know I'm different, but I don't think about it.

We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares question it. This is what is wrong, symbolically, with America.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.