Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I guess I'm a Luddite.
It's not enough to be against something.
Even when you don't know, you're supposed to know.
Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
I received my calling and accepted it at around 18.
Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
I don't worship the Bible, I worship the God who gave the Bible.
We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.
I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.
Men think women, they don't think men. They don't think toxic masculinity.
Tony Morrison said, 'Can't I love what I criticize, criticize what I love.'
Bigotry is surely an exportable American commodity, especially when it comes to race.
The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.
Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.
My ambition didn't grow out of nowhere. It was planted in me by a community that nurtured me.
We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others.
The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
I used to tell people when I preached at a church, 'If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.'
That kind of peer learning, that peer teaching, that peer evaluation, and then administration of insight.
My church is the world! I want to bring the gospel to as broad and as interesting an audience as possible.
I think that the over-incarceration of black and brown folk is one of the great crimes of American society.
I believe in a God of a second chance and a God of love and mercy, because I need so much more of it myself.
The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.
I grew up in the church and began to recite set pieces at the age of four and five, like many of the other kids.
Donald Trump amplifies the worst instincts. And his nationalism is really a white racist supremacist nationalism.
If journalism is the first draft of history, then digital literacy is the first blush of the first page of history.
I was trying to write a straightforward book of sociological analysis, or at least cultural criticism, and I failed.
I've been a social gospel-er and a person who sees politics as a central dynamic to the encoding of religious rhetoric.
I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.
Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent.
I grew up on the West Side - the "near West Side," [in Detroit], as they say - in what would be considered now the inner city.
I do believe that it is quite necessary for us as a people to reach back, over and down to help the less fortunate of our number.
I'm nervous about the prospects of an America that refuses to abide by its best conscience and its best lights and its best angels.
I had an exciting, interesting childhood, to be sure, with all of the challenges that ghetto life provides - but had loving parents.
Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity; that is indeed the "negative" way of characterizing African American identity.
I don't think you can bury words. I think the more you try to dismiss them, the more power you give to them, the more circulation they have.
All of us should be much more humble and contrite when we point the finger at somebody else, because four more fingers are pointing back at us.
We began to connect literacy and learning and the lively effects of biblical knowledge and preaching pretty early. That was a tremendous impact.
Black women must challenge black men to live up to their best in every arena of the culture - at job, at home, in school and in religious arenas.
All Americans deserve an equal crack at what it means to be a - having - having resources in your own home and in your state and in your country.
White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It's not black or white-on-white crime. It's proximity murder.
The demand for racial (and sexual) justice gets reduced to politics of identity - and excoriating the so-called perpetrators of the identity politics.
The parallels between Elvis and Michael Jackson as incredible artists is evident. But I think that where Michael Jackson even transcends Elvis Presley.
I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent.
In the barbershop, there's democracy. You're a professor; you're an engineer; you're a garbage man, have at it. You got something to say, get down with it.
Barack Obama has come closer than any figure in recent history to obeying a direct call of the people to the brutal and bloody fields of political mission.
I think the O.J. Simpson case conjured all the paranoia, the racial anxiety, but also the racial fatigue that America has endured over the last half century.
I think it's extremely important to challenge white brothers and sisters and think more systematically and strategically about the whiteness that they possess.
Oprah Winfrey represents the most ingenious and creative expression of black spiritual genius in the public mainstream that we've had in quite a long time, if ever.
He was not hip-hop's most gifted emcee. Still, Shakur may be the most influential and compelling rapper of them all, he was more than the sum of his artistic parts.