Miriam Makeba Quotes

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.

I was born in a poor country. I was poor, but I lived all my life with what I had. I didn’t spend more than I had. Cape Verde is not the only place where there are poor people

I feel I am privileged to express a hope. The hope is this: that we shall have peace throughout the world: that we shall abolish wars, and settle all international differences at the conference table: that we shall abolish all atom and hydrogen bombs, before they abolish us first.

...entrepreneurship, resulting in large-scale job creation, was the only viable mechanism for eradicating poverty in societies.

It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.

It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. Any existing distinction between the wise and the stupid, between the rich and the poor, comes down to a matter of education.

It's a tragedy that a lot of people know more about Shakespeare than about Cao Xueqin.

This is a story of a period between two World Wars — an interim in which insanity cut loose. Liberty took a nose dive, and humanity was kicked around somewhat.

Richard II by William Shakespeare

In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land.

Poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labor and exploitation of children … It’s a triangular relationship between child labor, poverty and illiteracy, and I have been trying to fight all of these things together.

Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden.

Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.

We were poor. If I wasn't a boy, I wouldn't have had nothing to play with.

They are reduced to wrongdoers of the mind
Merely because: They misused parables.
(...)
They are people who have missed life, stuck in a place where life is misunderstood
Everything they have gone through —— is a mere tragedy of birth