HARRY BELAFONTE

Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.

This generosity that has been offered to the United States says very much about the Venezuelan spirit.

You can cage the singer but not the song.

Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.

I think Bush has a very selfish, arrogant point of view. I think he is interested in power, I think he believes his truth is the only truth, and that he will do what he wants to do despite the people.

Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression.

You can be arrested and not charged. You can be arrested and have no right to counsel.

If you believe in justice, if you believe in democracy, if you believe in people's rights, if you believe in the harmony of all humankind - then you have no choice but to back Fidel Castro as long as it takes!

I've always been supportive of the right of Israel as a state, and I've always fought against anti-Semitism, even in my own community.

Black Tyrants

… the greatest tyrant in the world; the greatest terrorist in the world.

My social and political interests are part of my career. I cannot separate them. My songs reflect the human condition. The role of art isn't just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be.

We use celebrity to the advantage of everything. Why not to the advantage of those who need to be liberated? My job was to convince the icons in the arts that they needed to have a presence in Washington on that day.

Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.

My activism always existed. My art gave me the platform to do something about the activism.

Poverty is terror. Having your Social Security threatened is terror. Having your livelihood as an elderly person slowly disappearing with no replenishment is terror.

I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.

One of the true pleasures of my life has been the work of John Steinbeck. He was one of the people who turned my life around. I had no direct relationship with him, unfortunately.

If you want to look at the Monroe Doctrine and what happened when we wrote that, we stated what the business would be for America's power, especially in this hemisphere. We have always been the colonizer of this hemisphere, wherever we've been.

What makes a movement work are thousands of parts that come together and express itself in favor of a given destination or objective. You have to find men and women who are willing to play the role that each of these things demand.

I don't think that we are a species or a people that can exist without making mistakes somewhere along the line.

Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.

Peace is necessary. For justice, it is necessary. For hope, it is necessary, for our future.

America has never been moved to perfect our desire for greater democracy without radical thinking and radical voices being at the helm of any such quest.

I call President Bush a terrorist. I call those around him terrorists as well: Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, Gonzales in the Justice Department, and certainly Cheney.