Nigeria is a West African nation of over 100 million energetic people. It is endowed with lots of natural resources but lacks human resources.

I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.

I dropped out of high school four times between the ages of 12 to 17.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

I have expertise in five different fields which helps me to easily understand the analogy between my scientific problems and those occurring in nature.

I preferred to study those subjects that were of interest to me.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

Due to financial reasons, I dropped out of school after eight years of formal schooling.

When I enrolled in college at age 19, I had a total of eight years of formal classroom education. As a result, I was not comfortable with formal lectures and receiving regular homework assignments.

Our lives sometimes depend on computers performing as predicted.

The 65,536 processors were inside the Connection Machine.

One out of every 100 American men is HIV positive. The rate of infection has reached epidemic proportions in 40 developing nations.

During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life.

Briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected.

The Connection Machine was the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It is a complex supercomputer and it will take forever to completely describe how it works.

Because I believe that humans are computers, I conjectured that computers, like people, can have left- and right-handed versions.

Eighty percent of Americans with HIV do not know they are infected.

First, I identify an analogous problem in nature and borrow from it.

The Connection Machines owned by the United States government laboratories were made available to me because they were considered impossible to program and there was no great demand for them at that time.

The hardships that I encountered in the past will help me succeed in the future.

The labs were happy that I was brave enough to attempt to program it and the $5 million computer was left entirely to my use. I was their human guinea pig.

My focus is not on solving nature's deeper mysteries. It is on using nature's deeper mysteries to solve important societal problems.

It is smarter to borrow from nature than to reinvent the wheels.

Because I am not formally trained in the medical sciences, I can bring in new ideas to AIDS research and the cross-fertilization of ideas from different fields could be a valuable contribution to finding the cure for AIDS.

The hardship of living in a refugee camp made me psychologically strong.

Nigeria is a West African nation of over 100 million energetic people. It is endowed with lots of natural resources but lacks human resources.

The greatest grand challenge for any scientist is discovering how to prevent the spread of HIV and finding the cure or an effective vaccine for AIDS.

To be a slaveholder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way.

There is no way that we know what is going on between the African American and the Asian American. We don't understand what an Indigenous American is. We don't understand what a Latino American is.

Without Social Security, poverty rates for African American seniors would more than double.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

It is up to African leaders to show their will and political courage in order to assure that this new pan-African institution becomes an efficient instrument and not a place for endless discussions.

Because I don't play guitar any more, African harmonies and rhythms have been an inspiration to me. I love the raw origin of the sound. It complements my voice and words naturally.

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

I have a very personal interest. I am a Miami-Dade voter. One of the issues is that my vote and so many other votes of women and African Americans in Florida are being discounted or discarded. I want my vote to count.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, have played an important role in enriching the lives of not just African Americans, but our entire country.

When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.

I think one of the political problems we have in this country is the perspective that all soccer moms think alike, all African-Americans think alike.

The adoring crowds and overwhelming Democratic support in the 2008 election was based largely on joy at jettisoning Bush and the appeal of electing a superbly qualified charismatic African American leader.

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

Eight generations of African-Americans are still waiting to achieve their rights - compensation and restitution for the hundreds of years during which they were bought and sold on the market.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

A genocide in Africa has not received the same attention that genocide in Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in other part of the world. There is still this kind of basic discrimination against the African people and the African problems.

Whether or not all this came to pass in an East African ditch, I wouldn't like to say. Perhaps it happened in North Africa or further west, but Africa was definitely the place.

I don't think people have been able to deal with the fact that African American filmmakers can make movies about life and relationships.

In the final analysis, the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American people who make up the overwhelming majority of the world's population.

What we call soul has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression.

From the time of independences until the end of the Cold War, in spite of the participation of a considerable number of African states in the non-aligned movement, everyone in fact chose to align with one or another of the two major blocks.