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Appendix
- Caring
- Cooperation
- Community
- Continuity
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- Colonialism
- Courage
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Home
About
Appendix
- Caring
- Cooperation
- Community
- Continuity
- Conflict
- Colonialism
- Courage
Contact

Courage

We are living through a moment in history that is so pivotal, and so calamitous, that the generations that come after us will ask where we were. How we opposed the wanton destruction of human life. It is when I contemplate this reality that I turn down the path to Courage, and reflect on the words I have gathered here. As you prepare yourself and your communities to survive the worst of what’s yet to come, remember this: every act of courage begins with fear. Every celebrated hero and revolutionary began unsure if they could succeed. So, too, must we.

“Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny.”

Malcolm X, USA

“On my underground railroad, I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

Harriet Tubman, USA

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I unusually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Rosa Parks, USA

“I shall make [America] understand that there is a debt to the free Negro people which they can never repay. At least, then, they must make amends.”

Sojourner Truth, USA

“The Afro-American artist . . . a conjurer who works JuJu upon his oppressors; a witch doctor who frees his fellow victims from the psychic attack launched by demons of the outer and inner world.”

Ishmael Reed, USA

“The runaway Negro was the avant-guard, the first hero in the struggle to free his race.”

William Pickens, USA

“Early in life I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.”

Malcolm X , USA

“Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has to overcome to reach his or her goals.”

Dorothy Height, USA

“You can jail a liberation fighter, but you cannot jail liberation.”

Fred Hampton, USA

“You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.”

Huey Newton, USA

“I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler of Malcolm X. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met…”

Alex Haley, USA

“No country has produced so much heroism in so short a time, connected with escapes from peril and oppression, as has occurred in the United States among fugitive slaves.”

William Wells Brown, USA

“When I made the decision to refuse to give up my bus seat, I knew I had the strength of my ancestors with me.”

Rosa Parks, USA

“Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it.”

Marian Anderson, USA

“I am not against violence in self-defense. I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense. I call it intelligence.”

Malcolm X, USA

“I’m inclined to remind people of the things they’d like to forget.”

Sister Souljah, USA

“In every race, in every nation, and in every clime in every period of history there is always an eager-eyed group of youthful patriots who seriously set themselves to right the wrongs done to their race, or nation or sect, or sometimes to art or self-expression. No race or nation can advance without them.”

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, USA

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

Muhammad Ali, USA

“There’s time enough, but none to spare.”

Charles Chesnutt, USA

“They conspired to kill us, but we conspired to not die.”

Conceição Evarist, Brazil

“Don’t agonize, organize.”

Florynce Kennedy, USA

“In the act of resistance, the rudiments of freedom are already present.”

Angela Davis, USA

“You don’t have to teach people to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.”

Eldridge Cleaver, USA

“We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.”

Audre Lorde, USA

“You can run, but you can’t hide.”

Joe Louis, USA

“Morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. The law cannot make an employer love me, but it can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin.”

Martin Luther King, USA

“All de justice in de world ain’t fastened up in the courthouse”

African American

“Speaking like this doesn’t mean that we’re anti-white, but it does mean we’re anti-exploitation, we’re anti-degradation, we’re anti-oppression.”

Malcolm X, USA

“Speak truth to power.”

Marian Wright Edelman, USA

“Black art is a form of resistance and a way to tell our stories.”

Elza Soares, Brazil

“Education is a powerful weapon against oppression.”

Milton Santos, Brazil

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Unknown, Africa

“Education is the path to freedom and equality.”

Luiza Bairros, Brazil

“Civic education and civic responsibility should be taught in elementary school.”

Donna Brazile, USA

“You don’t fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.”

Bobby Seale, USA

“Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks.”

Kwame Ture [aka Stokely Carmichael], Trinidad, USA, Guinea

“Many are attracted to social service – the rewards are immediate; the gratification is quick. But if we have social justice, we won’t need social service.”

Julian Bond, USA

“An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.”

Lerone Bennet, USA

Politically, black power means… the coming-together of black people to elect representatives and to force those representatives to speak to their needs. It does not means merely putting black faces into office.”

Kwame Ture [aka Stokely Carmichael], Trinidad, USA, Guinea

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

Frederick Douglass, USA

“You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.”

Eldridge Cleave, USA

“We must recapture our heritage and our ideals if we are to liberate ourselves from the bonds of white supremacy. We must launch a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an entire people.”

Malcolm X, USA

“It isn’t where you come from; it’s where you’re going that counts.”

Ella Fitzgerald, USA

“The secret to our success lies in our unity and resistance.”

Lélia Gonzale, Brazil

“To die for the revolution is a one-shot deal; to live for the revolution means taking on the more difficult commitment of changing our day-to-day life patterns.”

Frances Beal, USA

“Black is beautiful.”

African American

“Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.”

Chuck Berry, USA

“We ask for nothing that is not right and herein lies the great power of our demand.”

Paul Robeson, USA

“…When you really do want to stretch out, and express how beautiful black is, everybody will hear you.”

Leontyne Price, USA

“Our voice is powerful; do not let it be silenced.”

Joyce Ribeiro, Brazil

“I wish they’d had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good ole days. A whole lot of things would’ve been straightened out.”

Jimi Hendrix, USA

“I can move between … different disciplines because I am essentially a storyteller, and the story I want to tell is about black people. Sometimes I sing the story, sometimes I dance it, sometimes I tell tales about it, but I always want to share my great satisfaction at being a black man at this time in history.”

Ossie Davis, USA

“I had to constantly overcome the disadvantages of having no academic training by inventing my own way of doing things.”

Gordon Parks, USA

“Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!”

James Brown, USA

“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own, get used to me. “

Muhammad Ali, USA

“[During the 1960s, people] were going to bed Negro and waking up Black. There were major psychological changes going on.”

Ron Brown, USA

“I had too much sense to be of any service to anyone as a slave.”

Nat Turner, USA

“Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”

Zora Neale Hurston, USA

“I want to be remembered as someone who used herself and anything she could touch to work for justice and freedom . . . . I want to be remembered as one who tried.”

Dorothy Height, USA

“If the house is to be set in order, one cannot begin with the present; he must begin with the past.”

John Hope Franklin, USA

“If there can be returning after death, I shall come back. But it will not be here; if you want me you must first search for me beneath the palms of Africa.”

Arna Bontemps, USA

“The African slave who sailed to the New World did not sail alone. People brought their culture, no matter how adverse the circumstances.”

Henry Louis Gates, USA

“Be loyal to yourselves: your skin, your hair, your lips, your Southern speech, your laughing kindness, your Negro kingdoms, vast as any other.”

Ossie Davis, USA

Acknowledgements

Copyright, Jonathan McDougall 2024

Thanks to Oluwatobi Ajimoko, Kristen Cain, and Kendra Johnson for assistance in compilation and editing, to Ariane Barboza for Brazilian proverbs, and to Liana Alston for editorial suggestions.

Biblography

Joselyn Pine, Book of African-American Quotations (2010)
Gerd de Ley, The Book of African Proverbs (2019)
Maryn Liles, 150 of the Best African Proverbs About Life, Love and Family That Are Full of Poetic Wisdom, Parade (Feb 1, 2023)
African Proverbs, No Sweat Shakespeare (last accessed February 14, 2024)

African Manners
The Wisdom of African Proverbs-Get Inspired From 300 African Proverbs From All Around the Continent, Safari Junkie (last accessed Feb 14, 2024
Quora
Reginald McKnight, African American Wisdom (1994)

Vivien Morris-Brown, The Jamaica Handbook of Proverbs (1993)

Copyright © 2026 Afrodescendant - Griots Wisdom

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