John Henrik Clarke Quotes
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Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
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I will only debate with my equals. All others I teach.
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I have no faith in much organized religion because I think it's by a bunch of hypocrites and practiced by a bunch of hypocrites. They don't mean what they say because all of them are in the slave trade one way or the other.
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Man's attitude towards the universe and his opinion of the universe predates the scientific probe of the universe.
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After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south. They destroyed the great independent states in West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western slave trade and the Arabs were in the slave trade before Islam and they are still in the slave trade.
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Our concept of beauty is taken from Hollywood, which is anti-black. We don't see ourselves as beautiful in most cases. Although we are naturally one of the most beautiful peoples out there, we don't see it. We don't get the point. Hollywood sets the standards.
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I don't attend any particular church now. I don't believe in denominations, nor do I believe in organized religion.
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Service is the highest form of prayer as far as I am concerned.
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I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
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All the working-class people could feel a Malcolm X. They could hear Malcolm X, and two weeks later they could whisper back what he said. Verbatim. They could remember the way he put it, and he put it so well.
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We have been educated into believing someone else's concept of the deity, and someone else's standard of beauty. You have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best suits your freedom, your dignity, and your understanding. And once you do that, you don't apologize.
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The white woman has never had the co-equal status that the African woman has had.
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She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.
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It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine that they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances of a given case, and the surest check, often the only check, on such perjury, is to recognize the impossibility that men of larger instruction and resources and experience could have been guilty of such conduct.
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You should not bear insults.
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The African had opinions about the universe that eventually turned out to be true.
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History is like a clock, it tells you your time of day.
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If you don't like the situation, if you are afraid and can't deal with it, nothing wrong with your legs, get out of there.
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The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa.
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It is unfortunate that so much of the history of Africa has been written by conquerors, foreigners, missionaries and adventurers. The Egyptians left the best record of their history written by local writers.
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Malcolm X found the language that communicated across the board, from college professor to floor sweeper, all at the same time, without demeaning the intellect of either.
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I want to make it clear that the black race did not come to the United States culturally empty-handed. The role and importance of ethnic history is in how well it teaches a people to use their own talents, take pride in their own history and love their own memories.
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...education has but one honorable purpose, one alone, everything else is a waste of time......that is to train the student to be a proper handler of power.
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Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they colonized information about the world.
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What example do you have of anything like the Pyramids outside of Africa? You have them in Mexico, but that can be traced to early African migration. So the African created mound culture.
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To make one people better than the other would be ungodly in the first place.
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There has been a struggle to reclaim the African self. That struggle has been on the part of a minority of dedicated African-Americans who never gave up our African identity at no time during our stay here.
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Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds.
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People get overwhelmed with folklore as fact. Take the Exodus. The Exodus did not occur. It could not have occurred. Wasn't necessary for it to occur. The Jews walked into Africa over a 16-mile land until they built the Suez Canal - that land is still there. Why would they have to leave by the sea. They didn't come by the sea. Certain people think you are against their religion when you use common sense.
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We're all in a test. With or without God, we're in a test.
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