June Jordan Quotes

Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

To tell the truth is to become beautiful.

In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.

I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think

Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good.

Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie.

To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.

To believe is to become what you believe.

Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.

That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.

A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.

The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.

That a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.

Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.

The United States Supreme Court, once a reliable if ultimate recourse for progressive and even revolutionary grievances, has become a retrograde wellspring for enormous economic and social distress.

My heart is not peripheral to me.

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.

We survive our love because we go on loving.

The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity -- the incredibly outgoing energy -- of righteous rage.

The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what's given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.

I am working never to be late again.

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet

Sometimes we become so sophisticated we have to read the New York Times in order to figure out whether it's a hot or a rainy day.

My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.