June Jordan

• "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.“
• "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.“
• "The courts cannot garnish a father's 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.“
• "But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.“
• "Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.“
• "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.“
• "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.“
• "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.“
• "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.“
• "To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.“
• "Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.“
• "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.“

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