"All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers."

“But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.”

“I begin to fully understand the lengths to which people have gone to protect me. What I mean to the rebels. My on going struggle against the Capitol, which has so often felt like a solitary journey, has not been undertaken alone. I have had thousands upon thousands of people from the districts at my side. I was their Mockingjay long before I accepted the role.”

“How many radio shows I did is lost to memory now; it's in the hundreds - maybe even close to being in the thousands - for the span of years from the time I was eight till I was about fifteen.”

“Our emotions tell us what to value. They're like a little GPS system: Go that way. Don't go that way.”

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

Source : Assata Shakur (2016). “Assata: An Autobiography”, p.151, Zed Books Ltd.

“Eradicate poverty. This is all that matters in my country. When I am out training I think about this a lot; when I am running it is going over in my mind. As a country we cannot move forward until we eradicate poverty.”

“The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.”

Source : "After the CIA, Barry Eisler writes thrillers". Interview with Carolyne Zinko, www.sfgate.com. July 25, 2010.

“I hate liberality - nine times out of ten it is cowardice, and the tenth time lack of principle.”