Quotes about Power

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.

I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.

And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

They shoot the white girl first.

there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. 'They don't know when to stop,' she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever.

schoolteacher didn't take advice from Negroes. The information they offered he called backtalk and developed a variety of corrections (which he recorded in his notebook) to reeducate them.

Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody thought he could. How 'bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain't that slavery or what is it?

Well, that's the way it was. Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody though he could. How 'bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain't that slavery or what is it?

It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. (227)

The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.

Girls can do that. Steer a man away from death or drive him to it.