Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact

Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.

White people think when you love yourself you hate them. No, when I love myself they become irrelevant to me.

What I have learned is that a whole lot of people with degrees don't know a damn thing, and a lot of people with no degrees are brilliant.

If we are going to be masters of our destiny, we must be masters of the ideas that influence that destiny.

Most human behavior is controlled by images. Image is a factor in how people look at themselves and what they use to reflect themselves. The control of images is a major factor in world power.

To be black and beautiful means nothing in this world unless we are black and powerful.

It's time for Black people to stop playing the separating game of geography, of where the slave ship put us down. We must concentrate on where the slave ship picked us up.

We will have taken one giant step forward when we face this reality: Powerful people never teach powerless people how to take their power away from them.

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

Whoever is in control of the hell in your life, is your devil.

Every thought has the power to spread its effects on other minds as a wave can spread all over the ocean.

Anyone who sees the realism in Lynch truly understand poetry!

Lying - remembering beauty in truth.

In 'Imitation of Life', I was showing how a girl might feel under the circumstances, but I am not showing how I felt.

I have to be creative to be happy.

I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.

That death is best which comes appropriately at a ripe age.

Who does not wish to be beautiful, and clever, and rich, and to have back, in old age, the time spent trying to be any of them.

The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then.

You will come home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.