Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair.

Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.

In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!

So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge.

The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.

Churchill knew the importance of peace, and he also knew the price of it. Churchill finally got his voice, of course. He stressed strategy, but it was his voice that armed England at last with the old-fashioned moral concepts of honor and duty, justice and mercy.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.

I fear God never showed mercy to one so vile as I.

The mercy caravans are through there the medicine refugees flowing out. It makes the United States look very bad here. And much more like an occupation force than it did before.

At the end of the day, you either want or you don't want to know about it. It's a mercy thing - you have to give back. However you do it, you have to give something back. You have to.

I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular - I can choose that.

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

As freely as the firmament embraces the world, or the sun pours forth impartially his beams, so mercy must encircle both friend and foe.

God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.

Pretty woman, I don't believe you, you're not the truth. No one could look as good as you, mercy.

Mercy should make us ashamed, wrath afraid to sin.

Pray God in the bowels of his mercy to send you his Holy Spirit; for he hath given you his great gift of utterance, if it pleased him also to open the eyes of your heart.

Truth and mercy require the exertion - never the suppression, of man's noble rights and powers.

Quality in a classical Greek sense is how to live with grace and intelligence, with bravery and mercy.

O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul.

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.

I was surrounded at the time by about a dozen of the enemy, whose clubs rattled upon me without mercy, and the strokes of my sabre were rendered uncertain by the energetic pushes of an attendant who thus hoped to save me.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.

Spare me through your mercy, do not punish me through your justice.