Maya Angelou quotes

Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else's freedom.

Ask for what you want and be prepared to pay for what you get.

Intelligence always had a pornographic influence on me.

Never give up on him. Never deny him. And remember, he is freer than those who hold him behind bars.

Since you're black, you have to hope for the best. Be prepared for the worst and always know that anything can happen.

If one is lucky a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

It is my neck and my life. I will live it whole or not at all.

At last, I'll be able to eat the whole breast of a roast chicken by myself.

Never, never let a person know you're frightened. And a group of them … absolutely never.

I know now that until the lowliest Negro sharecropper in the South is free, I am not free.

Every try will not succeed. But if you're going to live, live at all, your business is trying.

You've got to work. Write each sentence over and over again, until it seems you've used every combination possible, then write it again.

Let me leave first, baby. I hate to see the back of someone I love.

Black people are letting white Americans know that the time is coming for ballots or bullets.

all I had to do, really had to do, was stay black and die. Nothing could be more interesting than the first, or more permanent than the latter.

Keep on telling the truth, Maya. Stay on the stage. I don't mean the night-club stage, or the theatrical stage. I mean on the stage of life.

Sister, in this country a Negro is always about to get killed, so that ain't nothing. But you tell your husband that a black man was ready to lay down his life for you. That's all.

There is a silent scream, which tears through the veins, separating the muscles, pinching the nerves, yet the body seems to remain immobile.

most black revolutionaries, most black radicals, most black activists, do not really want change. They want exchange.

The root cause of racism and its primary result is that whites refuse to see us simply as people.

I came from a race used to violence and habituated to loss.

Permit? If we left it to you whites we'd be in the same shape as our folks in South Africa. We'd have to have a permit to breathe.

Don't you ever threaten me. I am an African. I do not scare easily and I do not run at all.

I'll put my foot in that door up to my hip until women of every color can walk over my foot, get in that union, get aboard a ship and go to sea.

I'm not going to run. 'Cause once you do, you have to keep on running.