"I still feel you should rock the boat. And if you're not in it, you should turn it over."
     Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989) published in Contemporary Quotations in Black, compiled and edited by Anita King.

"In my work...I mean to say that we human beings are more alike than we are unalike, and to use that statement to break down the walls we set between ourselves because we are different. I suggest that we should herald the differences, because the differences make us interesting, and also enrich and make us stronger."
     Maya Angelou, Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1993, as published in Contemporary Quotations in Black, compiled and edited by Anita King.

"All the elements are here to make America beautiful. You've got the whole planet's people living inside of America. If these people who represent the totality of the human family could live together in peace then the whole world could live together in peace."
     Louis Farrakhan, "What is the Need for Black History" address, Princeton University,(1984) as published in Contemporary Quotations in Black, compiled and edited by Anita King.

"When people are informed they will do the right thing. It's when they are not informed that they become hostages to prejudice."
     Charlayne Hunter-Gault, I Dream a World (1989), as published in Contemporary Quotations in Black, compiled and edited by Anita King.

"That's the game of life, being flexible and open enough to move between different circles of people."
     Michael Jordan, Rare Air (1993), as published in Contemporary Quotations in Black, compiled and edited by Anita King.

"Jazz is something Negroes invented, and it said the most profound things not only about us and the way we look at things, but about what modern democratic life is really about. It is the nobility of the race put into sound; It is the sensuousness of romance in our dialect; it is the picture of the people in all their glory."
     Wynton Marsalis, Ebony (November 1990) as published in Contemporary Quotations in Black, compiled and edited by Anita King.

"I think that hope lives in the ability to look at things from multiple perspectives, and I do think that is a human ability."
     Anna Deavere Smith, [New York] Newsday, (February 23, 1994) as published in Contemporary Quotations in Black, compiled and edited by Anita King.

"'We, the people.' It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed, on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that 'We, the people.' I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in 'We, the people.'"
     Barbara Jordan, July 25, 1974 as published in A Patriot's Handbook, selected and introduced by Caroline Kennedy.

"...Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins..."
     W. E. B. Du Bois, The Sorrow Songs from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as published in A Patriot's Handbook, selected and introduced by Caroline Kennedy.

"...That man over there say that women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place!...And ain't I a woman?"
     Sojourner Truth from her address "Ain't I a Woman?" delivered May 1851 in Akron, Ohio, as published in A Patriot's Handbook, selected and introduced by Caroline Kennedy.