131 Quotes by June Jordan

Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few.

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.

Buddy and Angela keep track of daytime just by figuring out the last and next time they will come together and how long alone. They become the heated habit of each other.

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we’re not running hard enough, not really trying.

This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.

We had to break those laws or agree to the slaveholder’s image of us: three fifths of a human being.

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives.

I think I have come to a place where I’m able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

Language is political. That’s why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that’s why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.