Phillis Wheatley Quotes

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.

We live in a society where there is no law in making money in the promulgation of ignorance or, in some cases, stupidity. There are a lot of things you can say never happened. You can go as relatively quasi-harmless as saying no one went to the moon. But you also can say that the Holocaust never happened.

First he appeared in the class of inorganic things,
Next he passed therefrom into that of plants,
For years he lived as one of the plants,
Remembering naught of his inorganic state so different,
And when he passed from the vegetive to the animal state
He had no remembrance of his state as a plant.

Let's go for a drive OK? Well I'll go for a drive, you'll go for a ride. The person who drives the car they go for a drive, the other people they go for a ride. People don't know that, tell them when they're in your car. Say "you assholes are goin' for a ride!

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.

Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglænds. Men derover glemmer man den anden Sætning, at det maa leves forlænds.

[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

To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

So it's gonna be forever
Or it's gonna go down in flames.
You can tell me when it's over
If the high was worth the pain.
Got a long list of ex-lovers,
They'll tell you I'm insane.
'Cause you know I love the players,
And you love the game.

I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another.

And it doesn't seem to matter, and it doesn't seem right,
'Cause the will has brought no fortune, still I cry alone at night,
Don't you judge of my composure, 'cause I'm bothered every day,
And she didn't leave a letter, she just up and ran away.

When people show you who they are, believe them, the first time. Not the 29th time!

[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.

When you give a man a dole, you deny him his dignity, and when you deny him his dignity you rob him of his destiny.

The opposite of work is idleness. But very few of us know what to do with idleness. When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time. And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health.