All too often, I'm sorry to say, I relegated my family to the cracks and margins.
— Harry Belafonte
One of the true pleasures of my life has been the work of John Steinbeck. He was one of the people who turned my life around. I had no direct relationship with him, unfortunately.
I knew Charlie Parker, and he gave us such a gift with his music. He put so much into so little space, and it was tragic that he died so young.
When I was 20 and 30, my visions for what the world would be, all things were possible.
Poverty was my mother's midwife. She had her children in poverty. But she also found a road to bring us a sense of purpose, and she taught us how to be valiant in the face of oppression.
Poverty is terror. Having your Social Security threatened is terror. Having your livelihood as an elderly person slowly disappearing with no replenishment is terror.
Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.
The pursuit of justice is all I have ever known.
Without the rebellious heart, without people who understand that there's no sacrifice we can make that is too great to retrieve that which we've lost, we will forever be distracted with possessions and trinkets and title.
Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.
Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression.
I think Bush has a very selfish, arrogant point of view. I think he is interested in power, I think he believes his truth is the only truth, and that he will do what he wants to do despite the people.
My activism always existed. My art gave me the platform to do something about the activism.
John Steinbeck is one of the most under-discussed and under-written-about of all American writers. He is way up there and should stand on a par, or even above, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
Movements don't die, because struggle doesn't die.
I think New York City most represents what it is that America in general aspires to. It's big; it's dense. I've known this city from all of its social arcs. The best that's in America is yet to come. The worst that's in America is yet to come.
I don't think soldiers should be anywhere in the world. I mean, that is a moral and a basic philosophy. I think that the only way to end wars is to have no military and to find other ways in which - I think we should suspend all nuclear weapons.
I call President Bush a terrorist. I call those around him terrorists as well: Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, Gonzales in the Justice Department, and certainly Cheney.
If you want to look at the Monroe Doctrine and what happened when we wrote that, we stated what the business would be for America's power, especially in this hemisphere. We have always been the colonizer of this hemisphere, wherever we've been.
America has never been moved to perfect our desire for greater democracy without radical thinking and radical voices being at the helm of any such quest.
If you believe in justice, if you believe in democracy, if you believe in people's rights, if you believe in the harmony of all humankind - then you have no choice but to back Fidel Castro as long as it takes!
I've always been supportive of the right of Israel as a state, and I've always fought against anti-Semitism, even in my own community.
You can be arrested and not charged. You can be arrested and have no right to counsel.
I'm always suspicious of celebrities that write about their lives.
I grew up in the Great Depression, and the jazz artists and Dixieland musicians were at the core of our communications and enjoyment. They were not passing fancies. They are something that is, and will be, listened to again and again. I have a space of reverence for some of those old jazz stars such as Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong.
What makes a movement work are thousands of parts that come together and express itself in favor of a given destination or objective. You have to find men and women who are willing to play the role that each of these things demand.
I think there's no city quite like New York, and I've seen most of the developed cities of the world. I admire this place, its energy. It's the repository of so much history and culture and diversity.
I don't think that we are a species or a people that can exist without making mistakes somewhere along the line.
Peace is necessary. For justice, it is necessary. For hope, it is necessary, for our future.
I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.
The Ku Klux Klan, for some of us, is a constant - has a constant existence. It isn't until it touches certain aspects of white America that white America all of the sudden wakes up to the fact that there is something called the Klan and that it does its mischief.
Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.
This generosity that has been offered to the United States says very much about the Venezuelan spirit.
You can cage the singer but not the song.
