If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?
Maya AngelouRead
It's very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.
Interpretation
Building connections with diverse people fosters understanding and community.
Maya Angelou emphasizes the importance of knowing and connecting with those who live nearby, regardless of their backgrounds or races. By encouraging us to reach out and understand our neighbors, she highlights the role of community in overcoming prejudice and promoting harmony among different groups.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, one might quote this to inspire local engagement.
If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?
I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
I dreamt we walked together along the shore. We made satisfying small talk and laughed. This morning I found sand in my shoe and a seashell in my pocket. Was I only dreaming?
I know that I'm not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don't know how not to.
I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people - one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion's den. You can't just play around with all those big cats - you've got to take somebody on.
We don't live in a world that nurtures and cares for Black girls like me. And if the world doesn't care about a Black girl like me, then what will happen to our Black babies who grow up to become Black children and Black adults?
I think a lot about our globalized world, our global interconnectedness, and it really saddens me when I see people 'othering,' when I see people who are willing to live narrowly.
Nothing haunts us like the things we don't say.
When you say something really unkind, when you do something in retaliation your anger increases. You make the other person suffer, and he will try hard to say or to do something back to get relief from his suffering. That is how conflict escalates.
You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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