In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.

You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.

These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism.

Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.

The working-class black Southern Christian culture I come from still nurtures me, and I mean directly, daily.

All over the world, young males and females, schooled in the art of patriarchal thinking, are building an identity on a foundation that sees the will to do violence as the essential way to assert being.

There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.

Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.

The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.

But love is really more of an interactive process. It's about what we do not just what we feel. It's a verb, not a noun.

I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.

I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.

I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.

What's really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don't even really understand that equality hasn't happened with the pay force.

I think the Women's movement has had a major impact on everybody's lives in our nation and in the world as a whole.

I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.

I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.

I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.

I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.

Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.