Evan Taylor > Evan's Quotes

“My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
― Malcolm X

“Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”
― Malcolm X

“People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.”
― Malcolm X

“If you have no critics you'll likely have no success. ”
― Malcolm X

“I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
― Herbert Bayard Swope

“A word to the wise ain't necessary, it's the stupid ones who need advice.”
― Bill Cosby

“I don't stand for black man's side, I don't stand for white man's side, I stand for God's side.”
― Bob Marley

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be”
― James Baldwin

“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
― James Baldwin

“I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
― James Baldwin

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ”
― James Baldwin

“You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
― James Baldwin

“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
― James Baldwin

“Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
― James Baldwin

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
― James Baldwin

“The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.”
― James Baldwin

“My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.”
― Huey P. Newton

“I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.”
― Huey P. Newton

“You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people.”
― Cornel West

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”
― Cornel West

“To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.”
― Cornel West

“You can't really move forward until you look back.

[From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University]”
― Cornel West

“In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle”
― Cornel West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto

“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
― Albert Camus

“I won't ever leave you, even though you're always leaving me.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves