African Quotes

459 Sourced quotes

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.

I don't know what causes the upset when it's stated that for the most part people of Jewish ancestry run the entertainment industry. This is not an indictment, and it's not a moral judgment. It's like saying the National Basketball Association is made up mostly of African Americans.

African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States, and excite in his bosom a lively, deep, decided and heart-felt interest.

Maria W. Stewart

Deep down, if we really accept that their lives - African lives - are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. Its an uncomfortable truth.

African-American women seldom do just what we want to do but always do what we have to do.

You will find a blacker world on death row than anywhere else. African-Americans, a mere 11 percent of the national population, compose about 40 percent of the death row population. There, too, you will find this writer.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

The artist has always functioned in African society, as the record of the mores and experiences of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time. It is time for him to respond to this essence of himself.

I believe in Africa for the African, white and black, and I believe in America for the Americans, native, naturalized and all colors—and I believe that any of these Americans would be foolish to give up their citizenship for a thousand-year improbability in Africa or anywhere else.

William Pickens

Everybody knows there is absolutely no difference between the native African and the American and West Indian Negro, in that we are descendant of one common family stock. It is only a matter of accident that we have been divided and kept apart... but it is felt that when the time has come for us to get back together, we shall do so in the spirit of brotherly love.

As CNN saw our growth in African-American viewership, they affirmed a fundamental truth of news coverage - people will watch you if they see themselves in what you report. It doesn't hurt if the people doing the reporting look like them, too.

Soledad O'Brien

Danced healing rituals (in African village compounds, temple courtyards, dance-therapy studios, public theaters, and other social settings) reinvoke old traumas for exorcism and the transformation of fear, convince people that evil is gone or possible to dissipate, and reaffirm communal solidarity and a sense of well-being.

Judith Lynne Hanna

Or maybe it's time to broaden out some of the African civil wars?

We still have too many Americans who give in to their fears of those who are different from them. Not so long ago, swastikas were painted on the doors of some African-American members of our Special Forces at Ft. Bragg. They are special forces. They do not deserve to have swastikas on their doors.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.

I care not whether the soldiers are of Milesian, Teutonic, African or Angelo-Saxon descent. I despise the principle that make a difference between them in the hour of battle and of death.

Thaddeus Stevens

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.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

Ben Aaronovitch