You can only appreciate freedom when you find yourself in a position to fight for someone else's freedom and not worry about your own.
My constant battle is putting aside time wasters, and I have to watch out for procrastination. Staying on the path of something you're trying to create has much to do with having confidence in yourself and in your capacity to realize the things you want out of life.
I learned that having great sensitivity is important. But being strong is just as important.
I'm very much interested in getting prisons off the stock market. I'm very much interested in upgrading the public school system... and taking a second look at capital punishment.
You should always be prepared to win. But as much as I tell myself that, I've accepted another kind of role. Racism undercuts expectation, something like that. I'm not saying that to excuse myself from anything, but I've lived all this time, and things don't happen.
I never thought about myself as an activist when we were coming along. I love the people I love. I didn't care whether they could be a Democrat, Republican, communist... anything but a racist.
Is it safe and sane to only have one political and economic system by which everyone in the world can live? Or can we explore and share? God never made one of anything.
There is a place for people 65 and older that no other age group can fit. We have nothing to lose. Some of us have a couple pennies. We can go out now and really be revolutionaries.
I didn't have the kind of talent or personality that kept me dreaming about Hollywood. They don't hire little colored girls to do this or that. After I got that in my head, I took another direction.
The nature of racism is that it grinds down the soul of the man more finely than it does the soul of the woman. When you want to conquer a people or subject it, you destroy the male component.