Miriam Makeba Quotes

The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

Reason is like an officer when the King appears;
The officer then loses his power and hides himself.
Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.

Just because you read it in a magazine,
Or see it on a TV screen
Don't make it factual.

Michael Jackson gave us pride. He gave us pride in our blackness, gave us pride that we can look good and be cool and be worldwide. Michael Jackson is a fucking icon. And I believe they took Michael Jackson down because he had too much power.

African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.

[Belafonte]'d take me to perform for Martin Luther King's cause. But when they were marching I did not take part, because I was not a citizen

This discipline and rough treatment are a furnace to extract the silver from the dross. This testing purifies the gold by boiling the scum away.

The tragedy of civil wars in countries like Angola and Mozambique is that they left many civilians maimed. Poverty is the reason HIV/AIDS spread so rapidly in the African townships and slums. Poverty is the real killer.

I can't love you in the dark,
It feels like we're oceans apart.
There is so much space between us,
Baby, we're already defeated.
Ah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah, everything changed me.

A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power.

?There is no royal flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it, for if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard.

I look at an ant and see myself: a native South African, endowed with a strength much greater than my size, so I might cope with the weight of racism that crushes my spirit.

[W]hen the President's visitors came to Guinea, we were all called on to go and entertain them. I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists. Even in South Africa today we are not nurtured like that.

I'm not a political singer. I don't know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us — especially the things that hurt us.

It's not my liking for guns, what about the NRA? We all have the rights to bear arms, I have that, I have that same right as you do. Just because I'm black doesn't mean I shouldn't have a gun; I legally own guns.

They were walking side by side, but each was alone.