I wasn't in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked.
Whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.
The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that. . . it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
A true patriot will defend his country from its government.
When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies.
I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean.
The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.
I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.