I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

I feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us.

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

I'm such a girl for the living room. I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that that's a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn't that interested in moving from place to place.

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they're beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.

Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.

I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.

Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.

I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.

I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.

It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.

Sadly, anarchy has gotten such a bad name. We don't really see much evidence of it because people associate it with reckless abandon.

Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever thats feminism.

If you do not know what you feel then it is difficult to choose love it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.

To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

While the patriarchal boys in hip hop crew may talk about keeping it real there has been no musical culture with black men at the forefront of its creation that has been steeped in the politics of fantasy and denial as the more popular strands of hip hop.

The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.

Even the most subjected person has moments of rage and resentment so intense that they respond, they act against. There is an inner uprising that leads to rebellion, however short lived. It may be only momentary but it takes place. That space within oneself where resistance is possible remains.

When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth.

True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.

Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed their strength or exploited it.

There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.

Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity.

Until as recently as November of 1966, I had complete faith in the Warren Report. Of course, my faith in the Report was grounded in ignorance, since I had never read it.

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the later ignorance.

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.

If not bliss, ignorance can at least be fun.

The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred.

The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance.

Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people's, if we are always criticizing trivial actions - which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through our ignorance of their motives.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation.

The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.

His ignorance is encyclopedic.

The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

Privacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone's illiterate, but you wouldn't really call that privacy. That's ignorance.