Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through … - Lorraine Hansberry

When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.

I’ll tell you right off, Matoseh, I know you are trying to decide: which kind am I? One of the obtuse ones who is sure to ask you all about rituals and lions? Or one of the top-heavy “little magazine” types who is going to engage a real live African intellectual in a discussion of “negritude” and Senghor’s poetry to show that I am — (He winks; TSHEMBE smiles back the least bit, warming) — really — “in.” Well, I am neither. I am a man who feels like talking.

A status not freely chosen or entered into by an individual or a group is necessarily one of oppression and the oppressed are by their nature (i.e., oppressed) forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition

What you ain't never understood is that I ain't got nothing, don't own nothing, ain't never really wanted nothing that wasn't for you. There ain't nothing as precious to me...There ain't nothing worth holding on to, money, dreams, nothing else —