Odinary people don't have a feeling of being loved by the people who manage to get into positions of leadership. They get in there, they make a lot of money, and then they play games with us.
I have a lot of faith in us. I have a lot of faith in humanity. It's based, though, on my own life; I've come too far to be a pessimist.
It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand and lie about who you actually are.
That is scary, when you consider what we're doing to children all over the planet. They're the ones who are truly being terrorized by all the madness adults are perpetrating.
I think I've actually returned to a kind of realism about how the world works. That's helpful. Because in a way, no matter who's in charge of the corporation that the United States is, the direction in which it is taken seems to be inexorable. So, you just get the job of being the front man for four or eight years. Now, most people realize that's what you are.
The forest is the first cathedral. I felt that from the time I was a child. I credit my mother with that. I used to think it came from her Native-American side. Whichever it was, she instinctively connected with nature, and taught me that. Church just could not hold my spirit.
I'm very disappointed in Barack Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks. I cannot support his caving in to Benjamin Netanyahu. I think many black people support him because they're so happy to have handsome black man in the White House. But it doesn't make me happy if that handsome black man in the White House is betraying all of our traditional values of peace, peoplehood, caring about strangers, feeding the hungry, and not bombing children.
Howard Zinn helped us desegregate Atlanta. That was moving because he took a lot of abuse for that. He and Staughton Lynd, a fellow professor who was also from the North, stood with us. They were certainly behind us. In fact, they often stood in front of us. This had a huge impact on me. But one of the reasons I was very careful about speaking about the relationship I had with him and Staughton was because, in a racist society, if you acknowledge a deep love for and a deep debt owed to white teachers, they tend to discredit your own parents and your own community.
I come from somewhere and from specific black people in the South, including my parents, who built our first school, and rebuilt it after it was burned to the ground. And they used to bake pies and cakes to raise money to keep it going. So, I learned to struggle from a very early way in a way that was truly indigenous to the South.
I almost never do anything for Black History Month, because I feel it's just another way to separate us.
This could be our revolution: to love what is plentiful as much as what's scarce.
We alone can devalue gold by not caring if it falls or rises in the marketplace. Wherever there is gold there is a chain, you know, and if your chain is gold so much the worse for you.
Our problem mostly in our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they're empty and they can't get enough because they're - you know, it's that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly.
I really think admiration for nature can save us. I mean true admiration, to the point of not letting it be harmed.
It matters to me that I feel loved by the universe - and I do.
Stretching [and] yoga [are] very helpful. All of these things - they really do help. Good food and a lot of sleep. And reading - reading good books. Sometimes movies - although a lot of the movies are difficult.
I feel I am a child that's lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.
It's almost unbelievable where we are as a planet because people have been so afraid of rocking the boat, of putting forth what they really believe, and standing with people who need to be stood with.
What hurts the most is being misunderstood. They tell me that's an Aquarian trait - that that's the thing we don't like.
Critics don't really affect the fact that we live in this paradise and what the meaning of that [is]. And what luck to have this!
You can just keep going and going and going, and you never get to the end of it because there is no end. The ending is a beginning. If you feel like that, then you accept that wherever you have to stop on this journey, you continue in some other form somewhere else.
You die - and this is why manmade religions don't work for so many of us. The notion that you're dead and that's the end, and they even try to contain you in coffins. They make them out of steel and stuff. But really, your journey - for all you know - is just beginning. For all I know, what you see now is just a tiny little seed. So, I may blossom into an entire - I don't know - something in the sky. Who knows where we're going?
My ancestors make up the skin of the world. That's who that is. That's what that is. That's us.
I feel that the ancestors are that covering that will cover me. I feel like I can only be enveloped in them spiritually and physically.
If I'm killed - if I'm removed - there is nowhere else for me to go but to my ancestors.
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