Quotes on People

Jealous people poison their own banquet and then eat it

There is no power in the world that can stop the forward march of free men and women when they are joined in the solidarity of human brotherhood.

People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

People notice peacemakers because they dress funny. We know how the people who make war dress - in uniforms and medals, or in computers and clipboards, or in absoluteness, severity, greed, and cynicism. But the peacemaker is dressed in righteousness, justice, and faithfulness - dressed for the work that is to be done.

In football, it's the ultimate team sport. You have to have good people around you as a quarterback for things to happen.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

Adventure is the invitation to common people to become uncommon.

I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people.

Revolution is the most dramatic appearance of a conscious people.

If people don't have a job, they're not too interested in how you intend for them to have a job. They want to see results.

If I have to travel, I'm going to travel my way and travel in the real world. And I'm going to have conversations every day with people in rest stops and people in gas stations and people in hotels and diners. That nourishes me.

Basically, when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

We have little control over the circumstances of life. We can't control the weather or the economy, and we can't control what other people say about or do to us. There is only one area where we have control--we can rule the kingdom inside. The heart of every problem is the problem in the heart.

The big question about how people behave is whether they've got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.

Inviting others to help us with our work in the Church helps them feel needed and helps them feel the Spirit. When these feelings come, many people often then realize that something has been missing from their lives.

I may be helping to bring harmony between people through my music.

I think kids in every minority need to see people like themselves in books; that's an acknowledgment of their existence on this planet and in this society.

When I was growing up as a young lesbian in the '50s, I looked in vain for books about my people. I did find some paperbacks with lurid covers in the local bus station, but they ended with the gay character's committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental hospital, or 'turning' heterosexual.