American Quotes

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.

So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!

My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

You mentioned Ross Perot. Mr. Perot jumped into the race at the last minute, had one issue that he ran on, the budget deficit, was in and out of the race a couple of times, and still got 20 million votes, didn't have the Internet.

We're trying to build a platform utilizing the Internet that allows the good American people to speak out about their frustration about the polarized country that we live in politically.

We have the American people properly concerned about the future of our country and the world.

The difference today is that, in both parties, the very extreme elements control the nomination process.

If you think the system - not you - but if your viewers think that the current political system is working well and serving the interest of our country, then what we're doing will not be attractive.

If you had found the right candidate in 2000 or 2004, and you could have put that man or woman, given them ballot access in September of the election year, they could have won the election.

I think the system is broken; most people think that it's broken. And we think that what we're going to do is invigorate the political system and allow for this country to be turned around.

And when you start talking about the practicality of winning a race like that - you've got to remember we're not talking about winning 51 percent of the vote. We're talking about winning 36, 37, 38 percent of the vote.

And a tiny number of people in a few states make these decisions, and we're left with these options that are increasingly not attractive to the American people.