Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Toni Morrison

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.
Toni Morrison

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.
Toni Morrison

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.
Toni Morrison

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Toni Morrison

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
Toni Morrison

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.
Toni Morrison

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison

Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.
Steven Biko

Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.
Steven Biko

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time.
Steven Biko

The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.
Steven Biko

So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.
Zora Neale Hurston

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
H. P. Lovecraft

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
H. P. Lovecraft

I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.
Marcel Marceau

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.
William S. Burroughs

Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.
Bill Hicks

Now I'm way into suits that I can put on whether I took a shower or not, and wear barefoot and paint my toes black or whatever color the suit is. It's very cool to wear suits like that. Roll up the sleeves and just say yee-haw.
Steven Tyler