“Trust in the universe and respect your hair.” — Bob Marley
“We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or, as we are conditioned to see it.” — Stephen R. Covey
“To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. In order to uncover his true visage he must shatter his own substance with heavy blows of his hammer.” — Alexis Carrel
“The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures” – Democritus
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” — Carl Gustav Jung
“If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself – direct experience of life. The same is true for art. Here, too, we an dispense with “the masters.” ― Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
“If there is a God, he is within. You don’t ask God to give you things, you depend on God for your inner theme.” — Bruce Lee
“Your self-image is so powerful it unwittingly becomes your destiny.” — Oscar Micheaux
“Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development.” — Harry Belafonte
”Don’t work eight hours for a company and then go home and not work on your own goals. You are not tired, you’re uninspired.” — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
”Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new.” — Barack Obama
“If it costs you peace, it’s too expensive.” — Morris Chestnut
“The problem with a lot of people is that, if they get rejected by a job they want or a person they like, their self-confidence becomes shattered in an instant because they don’t have an abundance mindset. You see when you have an abundance mindset and you get rejected, it’s okay. Because you tell yourself tomorrow I will find ten other jobs or I will meet ten other people. You always have possibilities.” — Idris Elba
“The terms “faggot” and “punk” should be deleted from our vocabulary, and especially we should not attach names normally designed for homosexuals to men who are enemies of the people. Homosexuals are not enemies of the people.” — Huey P. Newton
”Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.” — Simon Sinek.
“That’s why they call it the ‘American Dream’ because you have to be asleep to believe it.” ― George Carlin
“If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness.” — A phrase that was carved on the walls of a concentration camp cell during WWII by a Jewish prisoner.
“Black people need Black people who believe in Black people enough not to believe every bad thing they hear about Black people.” — Ivory Toldson
“We are always ready to celebrate the achievements of people of color or women without taking into consideration that diversity by itself may simply mean that previously marginalized individuals have been recruited to guarantee a more efficient operation of oppressive systems.” — Angela Davis
“There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.” ― Ken Blanchard
“Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden. Therefore, remove yourself as far from ignorance as possible and seek as far as possible to be intelligent.” ― Marcus Mosiah Garvey
“Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.” ― Thomas M. Cirignano
“My favorite genre lies inside myself, and as I follow my favorite stories, characters, and images, it sums up to a certain genre. So at times even I have to try to guess which genre a film will be after I’ve made it.” ― Bong Joon-ho
“Anything that’s not positive, I don’t have the energy to focus on it. Anything that’s not going in the right direction, I don’t have the time or the energy.” — DMX
“If they stand behind you, protect them. If they stand beside you, respect them. If they stand against you, defeat them.” — [Undocumented]
“I always loved running…it was something you could do by yourself and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.” — Jesse Owens
“I trained four years to run nine seconds and people give up when they don’t see results in two months.” — Usain Bolt
“We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. Don’t let them explore you until they’ve explored the secret universes of books. Don’t let them connect with you until they’ve walked between the lines on the pages.” — John Waters
“An artist, if he is truly an artist, is only interested in one thing and that is to wake up the minds of men, to have mankind and womankind realize that there is something greater than what we see on the surface.”— Marvin Gaye
“I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.” — Denzel Washington
“We as Black people have to tell our own stories. We have to document our history. When we allow someone else to document our history the history becomes twisted and we get written out. We get our noses blown off.” — Erykah Badu
“So our people not only have to be re-educated to the importance of supporting black business, but the black man himself has to be made aware of the importance of going into business. And once you and I go into business, we own and operate at least the businesses in our community. What we will be doing is developing a situation wherein we will actually be able to create employment for the people in the community. And once you can create some employment in the community where you live it will eliminate the necessity of you and me having to act ignorantly and disgracefully, boycotting and picketing someplace else trying to beg him for a job.” — Malcolm X [The Ballot or The Bullet speech (1964)]
“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.” — Stokely Carmichael
“Integration is the enemy of unity because it requires the integrating group to be subsumed, weakened and scattered as a minority in a society in which the majority rules”— Claud Anderson
“Long-distance running is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” — Rich Davis
“Our birth control method up to that point was Steve’s coitus interruptus, also called the pull-out method, which for him was about his conserving his energy for work.” She added he didn’t want to climax to build “power and wealth by conserving [his] vital energies.” — Steve Jobs’ ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan
”Do not give your strength to women, your ways to those who destroy kings” — Proverbs. 31:3
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best-colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” — President Lyndon Baines Johnson
“We need to be willing to be uncomfortable, to be flawed, to be imperfect, to own our voice, to step into our light, so that we can continue to inspire other people and employ other people, and make room for more and more voices and presence.” — Kerry Washington
“I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.”— Gordon Parks
“Reading scripts I found on the internet helped me become a better writer.” — Misha Green
“If I ever do become a filmmaker, I know that the leads of my films will always be Black women.” — Zendaya
“Some Africans away from home are called Jamaicans, some are called Trinidadians, Barbadians, and some are called African Americans. They are all African people reacting to different types of oppression” — John Henrick Clarke
“If you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film,” he says in the clip. “You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness, that you think you’ve seen a film, on your fucking telephone.” — David Lynch
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon, you have a dozen.” — John Steinbeck
“Wealth is not about having a lot of money; It’s about having a lot of options.” — Chris Rock
“Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive.” — Walt Disney
“I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O’Neal, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown, Pam Grier. For the first time, I saw ‘The Negro’ get one over on ‘The Man.’”— Samuel L. Jackson
“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.” — Malcolm X
“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.” — Muhammad Ali
“We don’t own the planet Earth, we belong to it. And we must share it with our wildlife.” — Steve Irwin
“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” — Franklin D Roosevelt
“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain—and most fools do.” — Dale Carnegie
“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”— Ida B. Wells Barnett
“Martial arts helps you see what the body can do, and how it connects to the mind. It’s remarkable. You take that into all areas of life.” — Scott Adkins
“Sometimes you just need to talk to a 4-year-old and an 84-year-old to understand life again.” — Kristen Butler
“I certainly believe that being in contact with one’s spirit and nurturing one’s spirit is as important as nurturing one’s body and mind.” — Laurence Fishburne
“The hardest thing in life is not about how much money you earn, but how to keep a peaceful mindset and live the rest of your life in a simple and carefree manner.” — Chow Yun-Fat
“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained in sudden flight But, they while their companions slept, they were toiling upwards in the night” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed off by future machines. They’re about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other,” he says. “Cops think all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job.” — James Cameron on why he made the T-1000 look like an LAPD Officer in ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’
“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality, and duplicate it.” — Bruce Lee
“Those cartoons were never made for children. Nor were they made for adults. They were made for me.” — Chuck Jones
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” ― Albert Einstein
“Scarcity builds value and respect. Familiarity breeds contempt.” ― [Undocumented]
“I only debate my equals. All others, I teach.” ― Dr. John Henrik Clarke
“You can kill a man but you can’t kill an idea.” ― Medgar Evers
“The first step in liquidating a people,’ said Hubl, ‘is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” ― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.” ― Plato
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ― Haruki Murakami
“Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.” ― Wayne Dyer
“By the time we learn to live, it is already too late.” ― Louis Aragon
“Rich is measured in dollars. Wealth is measured in time. For example, most people think $1M is rich, but if expenses are $100k, wealth is only 10 months. Being wealthy is more important than being rich.” ― Robert Kiyosaki
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.” ― Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, “No, I went to films.” ― Quentin Tarantino
“There is no substitute for experience.” — Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
“Don’t be afraid to employ people who will force you out of your comfort zone.” — George Foreman
“Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.” — Nina Simone
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself and half-believed before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” — James Baldwin
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” ― Jim Rohn
“Everybody wanna be a nigga but nobody wanna be a nigga.” — Paul Mooney
“If we don’t handle our independence very well, colonizers will come back in the form of investors.” — Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe
“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” ― Neil McCauley [‘Heat’ (1995)]
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer
“You aren’t paid according to how hard you work, you are paid according to how hard you are to replace.” ― [Undocumented]
“I don’t want to eat anything that has a mother.” ― Mister Rogers
“Call no man unhappy until he is married.” ― Socrates“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.” ― Mark Twain
“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?” ― Virginia Woolf
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” ― Viktor E. Frankl
“Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. They thrive on servility and shrink before independence. They feed upon worship as kings do upon flattery. That is why the cry of gods at all times is “Worship us or we perish.” ― Chapman Cohen
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” ― Marcus Aurelius
“Witches call it spells. Religious people call it prayer. Spiritualists call it manifestation. Atheists call it the placebo effect. Scientists call it quantum physics. Everyone’s arguing over its name, but no one is denying its existence.” ― Unknown
“You can measure a man’s mental health by his ability to say no to a woman.” ― Paul Elam
“If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.” ― [Undocumented]
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” ― Thomas Paine
“There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.” ― Ernest Hemingway
“Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.” ― Winston Churchill
“A man says what he knows, a woman says what will please.”― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.” ― Stephen Hawking
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” ― Oscar Wilde
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” ― Frederick Douglass
“We’ve got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A’s and speaking proper English: that’s criminal.” ― Spike Lee
“The real importance of theaters is that it’s the only place where the audience can’t press the stop button”. ― Bong Joon Ho
“If a man gives you freedom, it is not freedom. Freedom is something you, you alone, must take.” ― José Dolores (Played by Evaristo Márquez)
“What I find very offensive and condescending about your statement is nobody would say to a bunch of white filmmakers, ‘How could you do this to your people?’”. And then he continued: “This film has the right to be about his people, and Asian-Americans have the right to be whatever the hell they want to be. They do not have to ‘represent’ their people.” ― Roger Ebert (In response to an audience member at 2002’s Sundance Film Festival who asked director Lin if he thought it was irresponsible to portray Asian-Americans in such a negative light concerning ‘Better Luck Tomorrow’)
“Quite honestly, most women bore me. If they smoke, I’m turned off. If they drink, I’m outta there. If they’re stupid, I’m bored. If they’re mean, I’m bored. If they’re trying to use me, I’m outta there. If they don’t work out, not interested. ― Henry Rollins
“We are now experiencing the result of an entire generation raised on prescription pharmaceuticals to modify their behavior. When the feminist movement couldn’t destroy masculinity in boys with relentless propaganda, they just destroyed it and them with drugs.” ― James Woods
“If the mind is lazy, the body is lazy, Who cares? Go be fat on someone else’s time.” ― [Undocumented]
“Happiness– which is total and complete satisfaction with yourself. This means you realize that nothing and nobody else can make you happy. Happiness is something you get from yourself. If you’re completely satisfied with yourself, nobody can take it away from you.” ― The RZA
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” ― Socrates
“The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing.” ― Herodotus
“Good people struggle against what’s imperfect about them. The people that we call ‘bad’ people embrace that kind of stuff, embrace the darker side.” ― Brian Azzarello
“You need to build your own businesses and hire your own children. It’s absolutely criminal to keep having babies and then sending them into somebody else’s neighborhood to beg for a job.” ― Dr. Claud Anderson
“Animation is a medium, not a genre- nor an interest for kids & families only.” ― Guillermo del Toro
“I am definitely an ass man. It blows my mind. Talk about simple shapes. Two very simplistic curves. It’s so dumb, but they are fascinating as hell. It’s more than that. It’s the way the rest of the anatomy ties into that area — incredible beauty.” ― Frank Frazetta
“To say that God permits evil in the world may not be pleasing to the ear. But if He is held responsible for the good, it follows that He has to be responsible for the evil too.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
“When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.” ― Jomo Kenyatta
“I want an avowed atheist in the White House. When time comes to push that button, I want whoever’s making the decision to understand that once it’s pushed, it’s over. Finito. They’re not gonna have lunch with Jesus. Won’t be deflowering 72 virgins on the great shag carpet of eternity, or reincarnated as a cow. I want someone making that decision who believes life on this Earth isn’t just a dress rehearsal for something better — but the only shot we get.” ― Quentin R. Bufogle
“No matter what color you are, if you mentor some little boy or girl, you make a huge difference in their lives because they then model behavior that leads to success versus modeling behavior that doesn’t.” ― Mario Van Peebles
“I make a film like I cook for friends. I hope they like it, but if they don’t, I’m prepared to enjoy it all by myself.”— Melvin Van Peebles
“We’re the only people on this entire planet who have been taught to sing and praise our demeanment. ‘I’m a bitch. I’m a hoe. I’m a gangster. I’m a thug. I’m a dog.’ If you can train people to demean and degrade themselves, you can oppress them forever. You can even program them to kill themselves and they won’t even understand what happened.” — Dr. Frances Cress Welsing
“The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house.” ― Frank Zappa
“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.” — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Looking back on his initial film experience, he says, “It cost me my wife, two children, and my car.” To help pay for the film, he held three jobs at once and took in a roomer. “One day my wife said, ‘What would you say if I told you I was sleeping with the roomer?’ I said, ‘I’d raise his rent.’” ― On-Page 14-15 of ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto’ [Mario Van Peebles discussing his father’s passion and determination for filmmaking.]