Quotes from Ishmael Reed

America is the smart-aleck adolescent who's "been around" and has his own hot rod.

If Orwell had a chance to write 1984 from the vantage point of 1984 instead of 1948, perhaps he would have seen the class of hackers instead of the proles as a threat to Big Brother's rule.

Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can't even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity. And the extent of their knowledge concerning Van Gogh is that he "cut off his ear." Man, it's religion they make it into.

We will leap tall couplets in a single bound

I think that when people like you , Mr. Von Vampton, say "The Negro Experience" you are saying that all Negroes experience the world the same way. In that way you can isolate the misfits who would propel them into penetrating the ceiling of this bind you and your assistants have established in this country. The ceiling above which no slave would be allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds.

the Thing has stirred in its moorings. The Thing that my Grandfather Harry and his generation of Harrys had thought was nothing but a false alarm.

Americans will not tolerate wars that can't be explained in simple terms of economics or the White man's destiny.

Writin' is fightin'.

Critics of Afrocentrism can recognize the facial features in a police sketch as belonging to a Black man, but when these features appear on the face of a Hawaiian monarch, or on that of a pharaoh, the identity of this royalty becomes subject to all manner of esoteric hair splitting

When the press characterized the Simpson trial as the trial of the century, in a century in which the Nuremberg trials had occurred, were they saying that this one blonde was worth more than all the victims of the Nazis? That this trial was more important than tribunals for the murderers from Serbia and Rwanda?

To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean.

He is summoned and asked to swear upon the only book the judge will allow in "his court." PaPa LaBas won't dare touch the accursed thing. He demands the right to his own idols and books. It reminds PaPa LaBas of the familiar epigram: "Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow's Doxy.

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.