Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr. Quotes
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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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If culture was a railroad, I can see the tracks running from the Spirituals to the Hip Hop Nation.
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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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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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School buildings should be opened and used twenty four hours a day.
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Life is a process where people mix and match, fall apart and come back together.
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I appreciate my my sleep In sleep my conversation is witty My home is dusted My office work is up to date The dog is even well behaved And food is on the table on time But then when I'm asleep I don't have you to clutter and confuse My hungry heart
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I have not tried to tell the people anything. I have shared my views with the people but I have not tried to lead or correct them, assuming they need correction.
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Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.
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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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There are things you stand up for because it’s right.
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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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The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
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Show me someone not full of herself and I'll show you a hungry person.
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Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
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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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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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Now, everything I do, I do because I want to. And I believe the best is yet to come.
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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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The future is in good hands.
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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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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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You have to use what you have in order to get what you need and the people can not be rich unless somebody is rich. The Hip-Hop generation has carried more people with it than any other enterprise Black Americans have had.