Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
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I am a huge fan of the Black woman. I never hesitate to recommend her when times are bad or things go wrong.
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I’m a big fan of history—applying the lessons as well as the joys and sadness. If we pay attention, we would see how we affect each other. In terms of time, we are not that far from one another. If we were to look back a century, it would seem like a long time; but, if we look at it by decades then it’s only 10 years, and by generations it’s only five.
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There are things you stand up for because it’s right.
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I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office; that's a different sense of who you are. I'm just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people; I do not lead the people.
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White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.
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The more you love someone the more he wants from you and the less you have to give since you've already given him your love.
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Rage is to writers what water is to fish.
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America may not be the best nation on earth, but it has conceived loftier ideals and dreamed higher dreams than any other nation. America is a heterogeneous nation of many different people of different races, religions, and creeds. Should this experiment go forth and prosper, we will have offered humans a new way to look at life; should it fail, we will simply go the way of all failed civilizations.
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Everybody that loves freedom loves Harriet Tubman because she was determined not only to be free, but to make free as many people as she could.
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If culture was a railroad, I can see the tracks running from the Spirituals to the Hip Hop Nation.
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BEFORE YOU JUMP OFF A BRIDGE OR HANG YOURSELF OR BE UNHAPPY PLEASE CONSIDER: LIVE FOR YOURSELF; THOSE WHO HATE YOU HAVE NO PURCHASE
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Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.
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If I could come back as anything - I'd be a bird, first, but definitely the command key is my second choice.
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We [Black people] have always used our creativity to battle and we're not the only ones. Black Americans are certainly leaders in that simply because we were denied education and dealt with enforced illiteracy. But people seem to always forget that literacy is not the only way of learning things or conveying knowledge.
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Black Americans should be given credit for finding probably the perfect weapon; the weapon of the song. And that song continues. Most holocausts don't, so they have this bitterness left over. The phenomenon of the world, as far as Black Americans are considered, is that we are not a bitter people.
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No one needs to teach you to be mean; we need to be taught to be kind.
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The job of the architect becomes more difficult in this secular age. Where once he had a god to extol, he now has humans like himself; where once he had "he," he now has "she" and "they.
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Now, everything I do, I do because I want to. And I believe the best is yet to come.
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and sometimes I sit down at my typewriter and I think not of someone cause there isn't anyone to think about and i wonder is it worth it
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There is no such thing as writer's block. There is only not enough information. If you can't write, learn something.
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My work is a part of me and I know it. I have no reason to try to pick one part of me out from the rest. I only see my work, or rather I should say I see my work only telling my part of the human experience.
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Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.
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Baseball is already the world's most tranquil sport. It is probably the only active sport where you are not seriously required to be alive to play.
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Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.