Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.

You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.

Love is the strength of life.

There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.

We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same.

Because we're watching so many movies and are consumed by so many stories, science fiction lets you do something a bit fresh and that hasn't been seen before.

The black­est des­pair that can take hold of any soci­ety is the fear that liv­ing hon­estly is futile.

Tommy Smothers is my longest mentor, and Dave Eggers is my youngest.

Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.

What is painting today? It's a discontinued thing, discontinued from anything serious that happened in the past.

Zen says: be empty. Look without any idea. Look into the nature of things but with no idea, with no prejudice, with no presupposition.

In order effectively to liberate oneself from the grip of existing social reality, one should first renounce the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it.