Black Consciousness Quotes

In grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad. ~ Whitney Houston

We do not want to be reminded that it is we, the indigenous people, who are poor and exploited in the land of our birth. These are concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man's mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds. ~ Steven Biko

Black Consciousness seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life. ~ Steven Biko

Part of the approach envisaged in bringing about Black Consciousness has to be directed to the past, to seek to rewrite the history of the black man and to produce in it the heroes who form the core of the African background ~ Steven Biko

The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity. ~ Steven Biko

What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce real black people who do not regard themselves as appendages to white society. We do not need to apologise for this because it is true that the white systems have produced through the world a number of people who are not aware that they too are people. ~ Steve Biko

Until now (1960, date of the first edition), the history of Black Africa has always been written with dates as dry as laundry lists, and no one has almost ever tried to find the key that unlocks the door to the intelligence, the understanding of African society. ~ Cheikh Anta Diop

Existing in this era comes with many contradictions. Contradictions because we have so much to unlearn. ~ Malebo Sephodi

I think Willa Cather did a short story called "Paul's Case," and in it, when he finally commits suicide, it says, "He surrendered to the black design of things." And that's what I anticipate death will be: a totally unconscious void in which you float through eternity with no particular consciousness of anything. I think once around is enough. I don't want to start it all over again. ~ Rod Serling

In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift - a more human face. ~ Steven Biko

Marcus Garvey was one of the first advocates of Black Power, and is still today the greatest spokesman ever to have been produced by the movement of Black Consciousness ... He spoke to all Africans on the earth, whether they lived in Africa, South America, the West Indies or North America, and he made Blacks aware of their strength when united. ~ Walter Rodney

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness. ~ Haruki Murakami

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. ~ Steven Biko

I'm really disturbed about the gay marriage thing. Because I think gay people should get married, cause it's their own business ... Because as a Black man, I think you've got to be against any form of discrimination. ~ Charles Barkley

See who is the doubter, who is the thinker. It is the ego. Hold it; the other thoughts will die away - the ego will be left pure. See the source from where the ego arises and abide in it. That is pure consciousness. ~ Ramana Maharshi

The crimson satin lining gleamed in the firelight, and so, too, did his eyes. When he looked up at her, there was a mist to them once again.
"Little magpie," he whispered as he looked at the black onyx ring. "You gave up everything for this, didn't you?"
She nodded. "That is how much I trust you. Everything I had hidden away in that biscuit jar went to this. All my worldly goods are in that ring, Jude."
"Then I will take it and hold it close, and never give you cause for regret." He put the ring on his index finger, and Isabella grinned. How perfect it looked - how utterly sensual. She wanted that ringed hand on her body, comforting her. Loving her. ~ Charlotte Featherstone

No more shall the birds or the beasts seek to harm me,
From the power that has held them, they will henceforth be set free
And should another such attempt dare come to be
The doer of the spell shall be so cursed ten-fold, plus three! ~ Leigh Ann Edwards

You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue. ~ Claude Chabrol

The tree was so old, and stood there so alone, that his childish heart had been filled with compassion; if no one else on the farm gave it a thought, he would at least do his best to, even though he suspected that his child's words and child's deeds didn't make much difference. It had stood there before he was born, and would be standing there after he was dead, but perhaps, even so, it was pleased that he stroked its bark every time he passed, and sometimes, when he was sure he wasn't observed, even pressed his cheek against it. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings – to foraging black bears and twisted old cypresses – that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world…Small wonder that rivers and forests no longer compel our focus or our fierce devotion. For we walk about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not participant in our lives. Yet if we no longer call out to the moon slipping between the clouds, or whisper to the spider setting the silken struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us – and if they still try, we will not likely hear them. ~ David Abram

Shepherds buried the sun in the naked forest.
With a net of hair
A fisherman hauled the moon from the icy pond.

The pale man dwells
In a blue crystal, his cheek at rest against his stars,
Or he bows his head in crimson sleep.

But the black flight of birds always touches
The watcher, the holiness of blue flowers;
The nearby silence thinks forgotten things, extinguished angels.

Again the brow turns night in moonlit stone;
A radiant youth,
The sister appears in autumn and black putrefaction. ~ Georg Trakl

Giggling is a plague on the nervous system that I believe is hardwired into some people's physiology and seems to be a reaction to tremendous nerves, fatigue, or self-consciousness. It is rarely a welcome occurrence to the giggler and can feel like going over Niagara Falls without a barrel ~ Linda Ronstadt

Q: Why is it we all so desperately want to be loved?
Krishnamurti: Because we are so desperately empty, lonely.

Q: But you say that loving is more important than being loved.
Krishnamurti: Yes, of course – which means one must understand this emptiness, this loneliness in oneself. A mind that is self-concerned with its own ambitions, greeds, fears, guilt, suffering has no capacity to love. A mind that is divided in itself, that lives in fragments, obviously cannot love. Division implies sorrow; it is the root cause of sorrow – division between 'you' and 'me', 'we' and 'they', the black, the white, the brown and so on. So wherever there is division, fragmentation, love cannot be, because goodness is a state of non-division. The world itself is indivisible. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

And the lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes- a puree of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy. ~ Toni Morrison

I don't understand labels. I don't need anybody to tell me I'm Latina or black or anything else. I've played characters that were written for Caucasian females, I just want to be given the same consideration as everybody else, and so far that has been happening. ~ Zoe Saldana

Whether you have a Ph.D., or no D, we're in this bag together. And whether you're from Morehouse or Nohouse, we're still in this bag together. Not to fight to try to liberate ourselves from the men - this is another trick to get us fighting among ourselves - but to work together with the black man, then we will have a better chance to just act as human beings, and to be treated as human beings in our sick society. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer

The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all it's analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place. ~ Michael Chabon

Bringing light of our personal and social consciousness to dark corridors of human pain that have long been neglected and suppress. ~ William Keepin

- Vonotar, that unspeakable wretch, is responsible for my plight. Days before the Darklord invasion of Sommerlund, he betrayed your Kai masters to win power - the black power of death and darkness. However, he failed to play his part in the war plans his evil masters had laid. The Darklords do not tolerate such weakness - mercy has no place in their brutal minds. In the bitterness of defeat, they sought to destroy Vonotar for his crime of failure. Vonotar knew that I possessed the only means to effect an escape from their vengeance... ~ Joe Dever

Her eyes
lined with black makeup
stared blankly at the ceiling; and her tan was obviously sprayed on since her skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing. ~ Donna Tartt

No matter what we're trying to accomplish in life, or what career path we're trying to take, sometimes we get caught up and lose perspective on what's important in life. ~ Lucas Black

the voices are so persuasive, you don't know what's real and what's not. You know the voices aren't talking into your ears, but they're not exactly in your head either. They seem to call to you from another place that you've accidentally tapped into, like a cell phone pulling in a conversation in some foreign language - yet somehow you understand it. They linger there on the edge of your consciousness like the things you hear just as you're waking up, before the dream collapses under the crushing weight of the real world. But what if the dream doesn't go away when you wake up? And what if you lose the ability to tell the difference? ~ Neal Shusterman

I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good. ~ Kathryn Stockett

Walking back across the St-Esprit bridge, to the ghetto I'd instinctively gravitated toward, I mentally erected a more appropriate statue on the square. It would depict an unknown Sephardic Jew, kneeling over a stone tripod covered with crushed cacao beans destined for a cup of chocolate for one of the gentiles of Bayonne.
It would be a symbolic piece, executed in smooth, chocolate-hued marble, and dedicated to all the other forgotten heroes--coffee-drinking Sufi dervishes, peyote-eating Native Americans, Mexican hemp-smokers--who, throughout history, have faced the wrath of all the sultans, drug czars, and Vatican clerics who have resorted to any spurious pretext to squelch one of the most venerable and misunderstood of human drives: the desire to escape, however briefly, everyday consciousness. ~ Taras Grescoe

Becoming a junior usher at a black church was my entry into the wonder of worship. ~ Isaiah Washington

About the book of Job: If it were today, God might be asking How does DNA carry traits? How are instincts passed on in animals? How does consciousness arise in the human body and brain, and what is consciousness? What is dark matter? How did the big bang happen? Why does the speed of light appear to be absolute? Is cold fusion possible? How do you program a TV remote control? ~ Brian D. McLaren

The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out ... Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions. ~ E.L. Doctorow

Amazon is certainly not a perfect company. However, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, politicians, and labor unions are also on a continuum of consciousness, and none are perfect either. It is easy to judge and find fault with any company if that is what one's ideological biases wish to see. ~ John Mackey

No group is worth joining if everybody is welcome. ~ Jim Grimsley

Brain Juice was a recipe invented by Eve years before, when she had had to stay awake all day to look after Caddy and Indigo and Saffron, and all night to take care of the fragile and impermanent baby Rose. It was Coca-Cola with a great deal of instant coffee stirred into it. It was black and frothy and gritty, and it tasted like a primitive, medieval poison, but it banished sleep like magic. ~ Hilary McKay

In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn't white and I wasn't black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them. ~ Patrick Soon-Shiong

Many people in Nixon's camp had genuine faith in affirmative action. It wasn't designed to fail, but it wasn't designed to succeed, either; the intent behind it was not rooted in a desire to help black people attain equal standing in society. It was riot insurance. It was a financial incentive for blacks to stay in their own communities and out of the suburbs. (183) ~ Tanner Colby

There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the "white" from the "black," even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. The result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

(F)or somewhere in the act of want/is being wanted. ~ Sophie Cabot Black

My style is definitely schizophrenic; it does change from day to day a lot. It depends on my mood: sometimes I'll be going through a girly, childlike stage and wear a pretty lace dress with a bow in my hair. Then sometimes I'll be moody and just wear black. ~ Amber Le Bon