Desegregation is a joke.

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.

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

It is not very important where you are, but where your thoughts are taking you is important.

I'm concerned with protecting the legal system.

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

I was never really obsessed with the whole guy thing to begin with.

Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

No one has ever proved that a human being, through his descent from a certain group of people, must of necessity have certain mental characteristics.

Leisure, the highest happiness on earth, is seldom enjoyed with perfect satisfaction, except in solitude.

It may be the best that Hillary Clinton can do, but it's not the best America can do.

The way I see it, there are just 2 ways to go, livin' fast or dyin' slow! Which way you gonna go?

My father was raised in the mountains of New Mexico, and he picked cotton for a dollar a day. He was working for the family from the time he was 7.