What drives people to public service is a sense of possibility. If you haven't sensed that possibility you don't get started in the same way, you don't feel you can have an impact.

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

We don't have a full black community in Boston. Our people are scattered. There's a middle class where I live in Highland Park but it's not like a piece of Washington or Chicago.

On the one hand, there is no reason that a black person needs to live a portion of his or her life being concerned about the people of color around him. On the other hand, if you don't you're crazy.

Everybody needs history but the people who need it most are poor folks - people without resources or options.

Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.

Have you never picked up a book you've read before, and found it speaks to you in a new way?

It takes a wise man to handle a lie. A fool had better remain honest.

Moral courage is higher and a rarer virtue than physical courage.

I just don't have a lick of optimism left in me.

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

I had all these songs lying around. They had all these woman characters, and I thought the idea of the Woman King would be a good way to tie them all together.

Blesses his stars and thinks it luxury.

But fame is theirs - and future days On pillar'd brass shall tell their praise; Shall tell - when cold neglect is dead - "These for their country fought and bled."

Love is like a pineapple, sweet and undefinable.

It is essential that the painter should develop not only his eyes, but also his soul, so that it too may be capable of weighing colors in balance.