Miriam Makeba Quotes

I knew racial discrimination at its worst in the 1930s. I lived with the humility of it but I never lost my sense of humor. Humor is the escape valve from the deadly reality of adversity.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong.

I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually.

As a child, I sat in the back of the bus. I was told, time and time again, that God's potential didn't exist in people like me. I've spent my life fighting to change that. And, from the first day when I met Hillary Clinton, I've known that she's someone who cares just as much and fights just as hard.

Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.

I can see quite clearly that if there was a single event that launched me on the road to ultimate involvement at the heart of South African politics, it was an assault on an African woman by her white employer in a kitchen in Fort Hare.

I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression, sometimes there's the impulse to say let's deny the difference, as though by wishing away the difference we can then wish away the oppression.

In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.

The fantastic thing about 'Jasper Jones' is that although it's set in 1969, the themes are still so topical. We're still struggling with racism and sexism and domestic violence and abuse.

Only a straight white person would have no concept of what visibility is. They've never contended with anything but visibility.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil.

The black woman had had to struggle against being a person of great strength.

Out of the huts of history's shame I rise.

Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon ... that it is readily regarded as something natural, even by its victims.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

He won laurels on the score of his intellectual ability and forensic powers; but if our recollection is not at fault, his ground on the score of humanity towards the oppressed race [Blacks] was too low.

Apartheid is alive and well and it lives in our schools, and I'm sad to say it lives in the halls of the State legislature.

How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”

Is Justice to be established by subjecting half of mankind to the will of the other half? Justice, Sir, is blind to colors, and weighs in equal scales the rights of all men whether white or black…. An opportunity is now presented, if not to diminish, at least to prevent the growth of a sin that sits heavy on the soul of every one of us.

The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South ...

Now in speaking like this, it doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression. And if the white man doesn't want us to be anti-him, let him stop oppressing and exploiting and degrading us.

White Man’s Road Thru Black Man’s Home!