Quotes About Identity

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

Education is indoctrination if you're white — subjugation if you're black.

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

Although I now call him 'Sting' to his face, I can still distinguish 'Sting' from 'Gordon Sumner'.

That favorite subject, Myself.

I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home.

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

At some point you have to stop and say 'Enough. This is me.' and fight for it as hard as you can.

The things that scare you the most are the things that bring you closer to who you're meant to be.

Hello? Testing? My name is Jonathan Collins. I am seventeen years old. Today is... some day in July 1993. And I am okay. Scratch that, I am more than okay. I am... I am... I AM.

The things that make you different are your superpowers.

Have men always been terrified of their true nature? Is all history a record of their denials of themselves?

Why am I really here? To hide myself away or to burst open?

If all that a stone is expected to be is the stone that it is, why isn't a man expected to be the kind of man that he is instead of someone's idea of what man he should be?

Say It Loud: "I'm Black and I'm Proud."Some people say we've got a lot of malice,Some say it's a lot of nerve.But I say we won't quit movingUntil we get what we deserve.

I've failed many times to avoid those kinds of temptations. But that's not what the devil was really interested in. What he was trying to do is make me feel apart from God. Now I know that what Satan would like most to take from us is our true knowledge of who we are—which is children of God.5

It seems that I always am and always have been an outsider. I've never really fit in. I was always too religious for my rowdy friends—they thought I was unbelievably hung up—and too rowdy for my religious friends—they were always praying for me.