Quotes About Empowerment

quotation from Maya Angelou emblazoned across the side of the building: "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

I would like us to do something unprecedented,' Baldwin wrote in 1967, 'to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.

It is up to white people to release themselves from their own captivity.

Color," as he wrote in 1963, "is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation," he wrote.

To be sure, Cleaver's idea of himself as a virile black man was central to his politics.

You know, it is for this reason that all this black, white, Armenian, Turkish, Greek, Jewish, etc., etc., etc., never carried any meaning for me. The question is how to fix ourselves. Give birth to ourselves. To make us live free of all these swaddling clothes, free of these habits.

When a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given to him by others, he is talking revolution." That threat to the

I believe an elsewhere can and must be found here: in our efforts to refuse to accommodate and adjust to the status quo and in those very small moments when we make choices that place us outside of the norms and expectations that confine us, when we cultivate the capacity to say no. In

I remembered working on my last book and traveling to Ferguson, Missouri, and to Raleigh, North Carolina, to bear witness to what happened there. In those spaces, I saw and heard people saying no. In their pursuit of a more just America, they made a choice to not adjust themselves to the status quo and to put their bodies on the line for a different America where black people and those on the margins of this society might flourish.

I'm trying to break any chain of negative parenting that I might have survived.

Don't follow your brain. Let the brain follow you.

One person can destroy my world But not my light.

You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I'm fry bread, you bitch, and I'm proud of it.

You shouldn't dwell on it," Mrs. Jaks had said. "Forgive him and you'll live without his shadow on your lives." "The world is hard," his mom had said. "You need to be harder.

Can't is the worst word that's written or spoken.

The past can't touch you unless you let it.

A man without fear cannot be a slave.

You can do anything you want in life if you dress for it.

Everyone who has any talent at all in sketching, painting, sculpturing or carving, should have the opportunity to use that talent. The expression is important for the person, and can tremendously enrich the lives of other people. What can you do?

A race lacking respect for women would never advance socially or politically.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.

Applaud us when we run, Console us when we fall, Cheer us when we recover.