African Quotes

459 Sourced quotes

I am not an African American. I'm not from Africa. I'm from New York. My roots run a whole lot deeper than most of the people who don't have anything in front of the word American. I can trace my family tree back to the Mayflower. We may not have been on it, but we were under it, and that counts too.

Whoopi Goldberg

Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal.

Michelle Alexander

Because of its exceptional capacity for self-criticism, the West took the initiative in abolishing slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in black Africa, where rival African tribes took black prisoners to be sold as slaves in the West.

Vibrant as an African trade-bead with bonechips in orbit round it, Jupiter floods the night's black scullery, all those whirlpools and burbling aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.

No one can doubt any longer now that life for the African in South Africa is not life. If it is, it is worth nothing. But we promise that in that event no other life in South Africa is worth anything— white or not white. Let the United Nations and the world, therefore, save what it can. What it cannot will either be destroyed or destroy itself.

The treachery of these white men, even towards one such as I who esteemed their values, tore at my heart with great passion. That I, a virtual Englishman, was to be treated as base African cargo caused me such hurtful pain as I was barely able to endure. To lose my dear wife, fair England and now liberty in such rapid succession!

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget.

Somewhere ahead there beckons a civilization, a culture, which will take its place in the parade of God's history beside other great human syntheses, Chinese, Egyptian, Jewish, European. It will not necessarily be all black; but it will be African.

The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at the poor African; for every man is but another negro king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which Fate has bedaubed him.

Africa hit me all at once in those little clubs in Spanish Harlem. Got right into my marrow. I found my musical heritage, my roots there. African slaves in America were not allowed to practice their own religions or to use the drum.. The Africa they wouldn't let us have in South Carolina I discovered for myself in East Harlem.

Dizzy Gillespie

There could be no more powerful argument against mixing religion and government than the success of independent African American churches in placing racial segregation and discrimination on a reluctant nation's social agenda. Would black churches have been able to take the lead in the struggle had they been dependent on funds doled out for 'faith-based initiatives'... ?

TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect ("Glossina morsitans") whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist ("Mendax interminabilis").

There is a new dawn on the African horizon. I know this as a matter of fact that this new beginning is not a mirage. It portends a rebirth of Africa that can and must occur. It imposes an obligation on all of us to join together as midwives of Africa's Renaissance.

I've never understood people who say they're not a practicing Jew. You never hear a black guy say he's not a practicing African-American. What does it even mean?

Gilbert Gottfried

The term black or African-American not only denotes race, it denotes condition, and carries with it the vestige of slavery and the social segregation and abuse of opportunity so vivid in our memory.

The African spirit is a spirit of service. I do not mean in a degrading sense, but in the highest sense, in which the Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister—the sense He took upon Himself the form of a servant—slave in the original. The spirit of service in the black man is born of his spiritual genius.

Edward Wilmot Blyden

An African, or in other terms,. a Negro may justly challenge and has an undeniable right to his liberty: Consequently, the practice of slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this Land is illicit.. Liberty is equally as precious to a Black man as it is to a white one, and bondage equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other.

The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.

My friend, an African river bears no resemblance to a Venetian canal. Only the strongest spirit can hold both together. Only the most powerful heart can endure the pulse of two such disparate life-forces.

We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.

Richard Dawkins

I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.

African Americans have come too far and we have too far yet to go to take a detour into the swamp of hatred. Never let the dying hand of racism rest on your shoulder, weighing you down. Let racism always be someone else's burden to carry.

If the Democrats have their way, African Americans will continue to feel oppressed, despised and handicapped into the indefinite future. All progress will be downplayed and every setback amplified. In this way, Democrats can continue to rely on lopsided black support at the polls.

He who esteems the Virginia reel A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery Than crushing His African children with slavery, Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon Are mounted for hell on the devil's own pillion, Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows, Approaches the heart through the door of the toes.

James Russell Lowell