June Jordan Quotes

Quotes about:

Children Choices Country Democracy Enemies Fathers Fighting

We are the ones we've been waiting for.

June Jordan

Change, Life Changing, Yes We Can

June Jordan, “Poem For South African Women”

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

June Jordan

Beautiful, Love Yourself, Profound

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Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

June Jordan

Purpose, Durability, Increase

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

June Jordan

Freedom, Power, African American

June Jordan (2009). “Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays”, p.137, Basic Books

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Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

June Jordan

Political, Brilliant, Telling The Truth

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If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

June Jordan

Ifs

"Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union".

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And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.

June Jordan

Sweet, Sea, Waiting

June Jordan (1998). “Affirmative Acts: Political Essays”, Anchor

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Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.

June Jordan

Expectations, Atmosphere, Rising

June Jordan (1992). “Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union”, Pantheon

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To believe is to become what you believe.

June Jordan

Believe

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What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.

June Jordan

Powerful, Mean, Poetry

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I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me

June Jordan

Stranger, Learning To Love

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I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

June Jordan

Life, Happiness, Success

1978 Address to Black Writers Conference, Howard University. Collected as 'Where Is the Love?' in Moving Towards Home (1989).

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Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.

June Jordan

Freedom, Self, Sake

June Jordan (2009). “Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays”, p.92, Basic Books

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Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.

June Jordan

Success, Determination, Laughter

June Jordan (1981). “Civil Wars”, Beacon Pr

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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. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.

June Jordan

Love, Hurt, Children

1978 Keynote address for Child Welfare League of America. Collected as 'Old Stories: New Lives' in Moving Towards Home (1989).

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To tell the truth is to become beautiful.

June Jordan

Beautiful, Love Yourself, I Love Myself

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Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.

June Jordan

Successful, Justice, Diversity

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Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

June Jordan

Beautiful, Stars, Mean

June Jordan (2004). “Soulscript: a collection of African American poetry”, Broadway

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In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

June Jordan

Way, Serious, Telling The Truth

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I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.

June Jordan

Believe, Love Is, Prosperity

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I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.

June Jordan

Care, Want, Outcomes

June Jordan (2009). “Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays”, p.81, Basic Books

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To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.

June Jordan

Hands, Agony, Opening

June Jordan (2012). “Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan”, p.11, Copper Canyon Press

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As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

June Jordan

Love, Hate, Names

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Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

June Jordan

Who I Am, America, Soul

1969 'Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person', in the Evergreen Review, Oct.

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The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what's given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.

June Jordan

Yield, Needs, Genius

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Born: July 9, 1936
Died: June 14, 2002
Occupation: Poet
Cite this Page: Citation

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