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Quotations #27:
African American Expression

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Selected Biographical Notes

- E -

Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for.
--Marian Wright Edelman, 1992
Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.
--Marian Wright Edelman, 1992
People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests.
--Marian Wright Edelman, 1987
Speak truth to power.
--Marian Wright Edelman, 1992
Parents have become so convinced educators know what is best for children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
--Marian Wright Edelman, 1975
When you're dancing with a bear, you have to make sure you don't get tired and sit down. You've got to wait till the bear is tired before you get a rest.
-- Joycelyn Elders, essay in the New York Times, September 14th 1993

We taught them [teenagers] what to do in the front seat of a car. Now its time to teach them what to do in the back seat.
-- Joycelyn Elders, On Educating Teenagers aabout the Health Risks of Sex, 1993

There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.
--Duke Ellington
By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.
--Duke Ellington
Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.
--Duke Ellington, 1973
America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
--Ralph Ellison, 1952
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.
--Ralph Ellison, 1952
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.
--Ralph Ellison, 1953
When I discover who I am, I'll be free.
--Ralph Ellison, 1952
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
--Ralph Ellison, 1952
To identify the enemy is to free the mind.
--Mari Evans
Our only hope is to control the vote.
--Medgar Evers, 1963
The gifts of God should be enjoyed by all citizens in Mississippi.
--Medgar Evers, 1963

- F -

If we can put the names of our faiths aside for the moment and look at principles, we fill find a common thread running through all the great religious expressions.
--Louis Farrakhan (Louis Eugene Walcott), 1993
Islam has always been a force that dispels tyrants and tyranny, opression and exploitaion. Islam has always been a force that militates for justice.
--Louis Farrakhan, 1985
Never exalt people because they're in your family; never exalt people because they're your color.never exalt people because they're your kinfolk. Exalt them because they're worthy.
--Louis Farrakhan, 1985
History is our guide, and without a knowledge of history we are lost!
-- Louis Farrakhan (Louis Eugene Walcott), speech at Princeton University, 1984

You are the ancient builders of civilization. Before civilization, you were there, and when civilization was built, your fathers built it.
-- Louis Farrakhan (Louis Eugene Walcott), speech at Princeton University, 1984

It's wrong for men to have both money and power; they're bound to make some woman suffer.
-- Jessie Redmond Fauset, Plum Bun, 1929

Men are always wanting woment to give, but they don't want the women to want to give. They want to take -- or at least to compel the taking. If we don't give enough we lose them. If we give too much we lose ourselves.
-- Jessie Redmond Fauset, Plum Bun, 1929

Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there's love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.
--Ella Fitzgerald, 1987
The only thing better than singing is more singing.
--Ella Fitzgerald, 1954
It isn't where you came from, its where you're going that counts.
--Ella Fitzgerald
I'm the world heavyweight champion. I consider myself a citizen of the whole world.
--George Foreman, 1973
I don't even think about a retirement program because I'm working for the Lord, for the Almighty. And even thought the Lord's pay isn't very high, his retirement program is, you might say, out of this world.
--George Foreman
Ours is supposed to be a government in which classes and distinctions melt into a harmonious whole. Until we reach this ideal of government, we will be a distracted, contentious people.
--T. Thomas Fortune, 1883
Trying to grow up is hurting, you know. You make mistakes. You try to learn from them, and when you don't, it hurts even more. And I've been hurt--hurt bad. I might be twenty-six, but I'm an old woman in disguise--twenty-six goin' on sixty-five.
--Aretha Franklin, 1968
It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.
--John Hope Franklin, 1988
We also learn that this country and the Western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all.
--John Hope Franklin, 1988
We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.
--John Hope Franklin, 1967
When I go out there, I have no pity on my brother. I'm out there to win.
--Joe Frazier

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