Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Quotes

Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands.

The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know.

Despite Coach's admonishment, some of us on the team smoked marijuana. I had been exposed to it back in New York and had occasionally indulged with my friends. At college, though, using it seemed hipper and more of a counterculture statement than just a way of getting high. Plus, it helped with my migraines, which were becoming more frequent.

He had breath in him once,” he declared. “He is to be treated with respect, no matter the cost.” “Now is not the time for empty ritual,” Holmes thundered. “Now is precisely the time!” Douglas thundered back. “When we ourselves are empty, it is the ritual that turns us human again.

"Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was "written wrong" and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor."

Douglas wondered if his friend would make it out of this alive. He realized, not for the first time, that life or death was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the mission, their own small attempt to “proclaim liberty to the captives,” as the Book of Isaiah had commanded nearly three thousand years before. To engage in a war where there would be no material benefit for the victor other than the liberation of oppressed and victimized human beings.

"If there is moral insanity," he said in a conspiratorial whisper, "then there may be the reverse, immoral sanity, if you will, that comes upon one suddenly, like a fever."

The good and the great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.

The intellects of the Harlem Renaissance realized that before whites would see blacks as equals, first blacks had to see themselves that way- and not try to pretend to be white or adopt white ideals of beauty.

You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go. Don’t ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.

When Bruce closed the schools, he felt he was unburdening himself of having to prove through his students that his system had merit. He didn't want to get into that. He wanted them to evolve and teach, but It was not a thing where you have to teach what I taught. You have to teach what you learned and that's going to be more than what he taught, hopefully for those students that understood what he was doing.

Racist police, no matter what their rank, have to be weeded from every department and not allowed to work in law enforcement again anywhere.

The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the Northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance — in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.

political backlash has resulted in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country passing laws to make voting more difficult for minority voters. Punishment for raising your voice is to silence that voice.

I looked down the line of the wonderfully successful people on either side of me and wondered if each of them had a Coach Wooden who, to quote President Obama, “helped make me who I am.” I hoped so, because without Coach, my life would have been so much less. Less joyous. Less meaningful. Less filled with love. Later,