June Jordan famous quotes

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
-- June Jordan

#Political #Brilliant #Telling The Truth

We are the ones we've been waiting for.
-- June Jordan

#Waiting

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
-- June Jordan

#Names

I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.
-- June Jordan

#Believe #Views #Perspective

suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: there is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you - who you really are - do survive.
-- June Jordan

#Suicide #Thinking #Survival

Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?
-- June Jordan

#Mean #Men #Want

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.
-- June Jordan

#Fear #America #White

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?
-- June Jordan

#America #Who I Am #Soul

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.
-- June Jordan

#Beautiful #Love Yourself #Profound

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.
-- June Jordan

#Hurt #Children #Differences

In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
-- June Jordan

#Way #Serious #Telling The Truth

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
-- June Jordan

#Two #Worry #Way

I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me
-- June Jordan

#Stranger #Learning To Love

Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.
-- June Jordan

#Country #Fighting #Men

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives
-- June Jordan

#Girl #Children #Flower

If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here.
-- June Jordan

#Names #Voice #Diversity

Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis: open, relentless, and on time! She is as radiant, she is as true, as that invincible sunrise she means means means to advance With all of the faith and all of the grace of her entirely devoted life.
-- June Jordan

#Heart #Mean #Grace

Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good ...
-- June Jordan

#Men #White #Joy

... the histories of Blacks and Jews in bondage and out of bondage, have been blood histories pursued through our kindred searchings for self-determination. Let this blood be a stain of honor that we share. Let us not now become enemies to ourselves and to each other.
-- June Jordan

#Determination #Self #Blood

Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?
-- June Jordan

#Running #New York #Men

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires ...
-- June Jordan

#Freedom #Power #African American

Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie.
-- June Jordan

#Pie #Doe #Towns

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.
-- June Jordan

#Children #Differences #Forever

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.
-- June Jordan

#Hate #Requirements #Language

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet
-- June Jordan

#Writing #Important #Language

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think
-- June Jordan

#Thinking #Firsts #Telling The Truth

The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what's given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.
-- June Jordan

#Yield #Needs #Genius

There is a man who exists as one of the most popular objects of leadership, legislation, and quasi-literature in the history of all men. . . . This man, that object of attention, attack, and vast activity, cannot make himself be heard, let alone understood. He has never been listened to. . . . That man is Black and alive in white America where the media of communication do not allow the delivery of his own voice, his own desires, his own rage.
-- June Jordan

#Communication #Men #Media

What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.
-- June Jordan

#Powerful #Mean #Poetry

When that devil's bullet lodged itself inside the body of Martin Luther King, he had already begun an astonishing mobilization of poor, Black, white, latino Americans who had nothing to lose. They would challenge our government to eliminate exploitative, merciless, and war-mongering policies, nationwide, or else "tie up the country" through "means of civil disobedience." Dr. King intended to organize those legions into "coercive direct actions" that would make of Babylon a dysfunctional behemoth begging for relief. Is it any wonder he was killed?
-- June Jordan

#Country #Kings #War

A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.
-- June Jordan

#Strong #Democracy #Welfare

The United States Supreme Court, once a reliable if ultimate recourse for progressive and even revolutionary grievances, has become a retrograde wellspring for enormous economic and social distress.
-- June Jordan

#Law #Justice #United States

The courts cannot garnish a fathers salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.
-- June Jordan

#Children #Father #Kids

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.
-- June Jordan

#People #Important

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
-- June Jordan

#Life #Happiness #Success

That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.
-- June Jordan

#Attitude #Fighting #Political

I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.
-- June Jordan

#Thinking #Able #Honest

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
-- June Jordan

#Country #Years #Two

And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.
-- June Jordan

#Sweet #Sea #Waiting

To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.
-- June Jordan

#Hands #Agony #Opening

Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
-- June Jordan

#Successful #Justice #Enemy

Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.
-- June Jordan

#Success #Determination #Motivation

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.
-- June Jordan

#Love #Hate #Names

If we even tolerate any oppression of gay and lesbian Americans, if we join those who would intrude upon the choices of our hearts, then who among us shall be free?
-- June Jordan

#Heart #Gay #Justice

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.
-- June Jordan

#Brother #Lying #Writing

So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
-- June Jordan

#Mean #People #Leader

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.
-- June Jordan

#Beautiful #Stars #Mean

I am the history of the rejection of who I am
-- June Jordan

#Who I Am #Rejection

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.
-- June Jordan

#Hate #Poet

As I think about anyone or anything -- whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film -- as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?
-- June Jordan

#Father #Commitment #Thinking

What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?
-- June Jordan

#Heart #Sexuality #Tyranny

The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity -- the incredibly outgoing energy -- of righteous rage.
-- June Jordan

#Energy #Legacy #Moral

Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.
-- June Jordan

#Expectations #Atmosphere #Rising

In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of dissent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.
-- June Jordan

#Thinking #White #America

South Africa used to seem so far away. Then it came home to me. It began to signify the meaning of white hatred here. That was what the sheets and the suits and the ties covered up, not very well. That was what the cowardly guys calling me names from their speeding truck wanted to happen to me, to all of me: to my people. That was what would happen to me if I walked around the corner into the wrong neighborhood. That was Birmingham. That was Brooklyn. That was Reagan. That was the end of reason. South Africa was how I came to understand that I am not against war; I am against losing the war.
-- June Jordan

#War #Home #Names

Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.
-- June Jordan

#Freedom #Self #Sake

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
-- June Jordan

#Children #Motherhood #Names

... if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force? What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart, and that attempts to dictate the public career of an honest human body?
-- June Jordan

#Heart #Careers #Community

Reproductive choice is not some trendy item to toss or keep around the house. If you cannot get an education or a job, if you cannot choose what will or will not happen with your own body, then what freedom do you have?
-- June Jordan

#Jobs #Choices #House

As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.
-- June Jordan

#Believe #Fighting #I Believe

The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.
-- June Jordan

#Lying #Goal #Comfort

My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair
-- June Jordan

#Father #Fighting #Taught

One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!
-- June Jordan

#Views #Color #Different

If any of us hopes to survive, she must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.
-- June Jordan

#Women #Political #Majority

My heart is not peripheral to me.
-- June Jordan

#Heart #My Heart

If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable.
-- June Jordan

and if i if i ever let love go because the hatred and the whisperings become a phantom dictate i o- bey in lieu of impulse and realities (the blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees) then let love freeze me out. (from i must become a menace to my enemies)
-- June Jordan

#Reality #Tree #Hatred

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.
-- June Jordan

#Running #Hurt #Good Life

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
-- June Jordan

#Children #Motherhood #Thinking

Lately... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak. You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you.
-- June Jordan

#White #Pie #America

My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.
-- June Jordan

#Father #Hero #Tyrants

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.
-- June Jordan

#Friendship #Mother #Young Mother

That a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.
-- June Jordan

#Hurt #Children #Littles

I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.
-- June Jordan

#Believe #Love Is #Prosperity

As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth - whatever the truth may be - that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.
-- June Jordan

#Children #Adults #May

We need everybody and all that we are. We need to know and make known the complete, constantly unfolding, complicated heritage that is our black experience. We should absolutely resist the superstar, one at a time mentality that threatens the varied and resilient, flexible wealth of our Black future.
-- June Jordan

#Black #Needs #Heritage

We survive our love because we go on loving.
-- June Jordan

#Love Is #Goes On #Our Love

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.
-- June Jordan

#History #African American #Soul

I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.
-- June Jordan

#Care #Want #Outcomes

To tell the truth is to become beautiful.
-- June Jordan

#Beautiful #Telling The Truth #Truth Is

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.
-- June Jordan

#Education #Mean #World

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.
-- June Jordan

#Suicide #America #Black

To believe is to become what you believe.
-- June Jordan

#Believe