African Quotes

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.
Barack Obama

Love, Success, Faith

I have always regarded myself, in the first place, as an African patriot.
Nelson Mandela

Place, Patriot, Regarded

The African is my brother but he is my younger brother by several centuries.
Albert Schweitzer

Brother, Younger, Centuries

African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence.
Wangari Maathai

Women, Strength, Fear

I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.
Howard Stern

Religion, Rock, Around

Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?
Henry Louis Gates

Great, War, Mind

We pride ourselves as being top, really, on the African ladder... We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards.
Robert Mugabe

Pride, Rather, Actually

I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.
Miriam Makeba

Nature, Strength, Racism

I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
John Henrik Clarke

Age, History, School

Nigeria is a West African nation of over 100 million energetic people. It is endowed with lots of natural resources but lacks human resources.
Philip Emeagwali

Human, Nation, Natural

The concern around probable questions, which in a sense have been hidden, will grow around the world and the matter is critical, the reason we are doing all this is so we can respond correctly to what is reported to be a major catastrophe on the African continent.
Thabo Mbeki

Around, Sense, Reason

I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.
Desmond Tutu

Death, Sunday, Mean

From the world wars of Europe to the jungles of the Far East, from the deserts of the Middle East to the African continent, and even here in our own hemisphere, our veterans have made the world a better place and America the great country we are today.
John Hoeven

Great, Today, Country

Because I don't play guitar any more, African harmonies and rhythms have been an inspiration to me. I love the raw origin of the sound. It complements my voice and words naturally.
Cat Stevens

Love, Words, Play

It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.
Wangari Maathai

Good, Women, Men

I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American.
Jimmy Carter

Black, American, Fact

There's a similarity between European and North African folk musics.
Robert Plant

Between, Folk, Similarity

First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.
Carlos Santana

Music, Black, Call

I have my mother who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African.
Alicia Keys

Mother, Father, Taste

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.
Denis Diderot

Good, Government, Bad

Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
Henry Louis Gates

Same, Since, Helping

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.
Henry Louis Gates

Men, Long, Black

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that.
Henry Louis Gates

Best, Patriotism, Black

I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?
Henry Louis Gates

Important, Through, Here

First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look - no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.
Henry Louis Gates

Black, Revolution, Poverty

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov

Dreams, Snow, Genius

So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.
Henry Louis Gates

Beautiful, Wanted, Culture

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Henry Louis Gates

Truth, Business, Sad

Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.
Henry Louis Gates

Great, Leader, American

People identify with me - everyone does - African American women, Caucasian women, they all identify with me because I'm ethnic.
Janice Dickinson

Women, Everyone, American

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