Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
When you socially neglect a people, when you economically abandon a people, when you transfer wealth from them to the well-to-do, what are a people going to do? They're going to respond with very sad forms of despair, and that's true for everybody - I don't care what color you are.
We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.
I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself. I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts.
King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.
I'm not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions.
I'm against genocide. I'm against fascism. I'm willing to fight against them so that, in that sense, I think one can still be committed to justice and committed to peace but recognize the circumstances under which one does have to fight.
I tend to be one who just speaks from my soul, and so what comes out sometimes is rather harsh. In that sense, I'm very much a part of the tradition of a Frederick Douglass or a Malcolm X who used hyperbolic language at times to bring attention to the state of emergency.
There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference.
I feel as if I have been blessed to undergo a transformation from 'gangster' to 'redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities.'
Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.
A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all.
Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.
We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.
Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a man of peace. He was a radical pacifist, and so he was against war across the board.
We had a much deeper sense of community in '67 than we do in '97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good.
It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.
I've never been tied to one party or one candidate or even one institution. And that's true even with one church as a Christian. I'm committed to truth and justice.
It's never a question of skin pigmentation. It's never a question of just culture or sexual orientation or civilization. It's what kind of human being you're going to choose to be from your mama's womb to the tomb and what kind of legacy will you leave.
You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it.
