“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

“I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plan...”

“liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty a...”

“To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom.”

“To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can...”

“It is a beautiful thing to be on fire for justice there is no greater joy than inspiring and empowering othersespecially the least of these, the precious and priceless wretched of the earth!”

“I'm the girl nobody knows until she commits suicide. Then suddenly everyone had a class with her.”

“It's okay. We aren't in the same class. Just don't forget that some of us watch the sunset too.”

“We are the same, you and I. Whether samurai or night-hawk, the Suruga Dainagon or member of the Toudouza, it makes no difference. My sword is the proof...."These words, wrung from the very depths o...”

“[W]hen it's slow, they send you home, and when it's busy, they expect you to stay late. They also expect you to be able to come in to cover someone's shift if a co-worker gets sick at the last minu...”

“Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to p...”

“A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”