James McBride Quotes

It's important for youth, black youths particularly, to be able to fill in the blanks of themselves so they can know completely who they are, but also all the country to understand what this means: what the civil rights movement does to us as people. It is part of the journey that we must be on in order to become fully evolved human beings.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

People have to learn who they are - you can't have somebody else telling you who you are.

I think skating helped me find myself.

Trying to give an individual a voice has always kind of been my mission in my life. As an actor, I've always seen that was something that needed to be done. You need to find that voice inside of you so that you can stand up and be who you really are.

I can be Erykah the human being more than the celebrity.

I am a collection of thoughts and memories and likes and dislikes. I am the things that have happened to me and the sum of everything I've ever done. I am the clothes I wear on my back. I am every place and every person and every object I have ever come across. I am a bag of bones stuck to a very large rock spinning a thousand miles an hour.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

I don't believe complete assimilation is possible, at least not for anyone who has an active, open mind. Every step, every entry into the flows of existence can be seen as a beginning, a commencement of a brand new way of seeing oneself in the world. This is the case for everyone.

I can only tell you that when long soul-searching and a combination of circumstances delivered me of my last prejudices, there was an exalted sense of liberation. It was not the Negro who became free, but I.

We really have to be willing to find out who we are instead of rebelling for the equal rights that we've been denied, that we do deserve.

I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. I'm going to figure out what that is.

Make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You push for colour-blind casting; you draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are, not what colour your parents happen to be.

Being born was the most influential thing that's ever happened to me, for myself.

I've come out of myself as a person at Chelsea and expressed myself on and off the pitch.

Find your voice and don't be afraid to explore it.

We're all different; we all have our ways of understanding ourselves and the way we live our lives and struggle with our humanity.

When the work you're doing every single day is so directly about who you are as an individual and who you are as a person, it can be both exhausting and empowering in different moments.

For me, the only way I know how to do this is to be myself. I actually learned that from 'The Dream' Dusty Rhodes. I was trying to be this wrestler, and I was trying to be cool, and Dusty literally told me, 'You've got to be yourself.' That's really how Bayley started, and that is what brought me this far.

I have a cult-like following because I exemplify what it is to be a human being.

I have started exploring my own life and have started valuing myself. I have started valuing my individuality.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.

Be true. Be beautiful. Be free. In the midst of segregation and racism Mamma raised us to be independent and free. We saw ourselves as citizens of the world, not of a block.