131 Quotes by June Jordan

As I think about anyone or anything – whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film – as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?

I am the history of the rejection of who I am.

Who the hell set things up like this?

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires...

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that’s political, in its most profound way.

Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good...

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn’t know the poems would travel. I didn’t go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity – the incredibly outgoing energy – of righteous rage.