Vernon Jordan Quotes

I know a lot of people who are weak, who are in a perpetual cycle of poverty and being locked up. There are guys from my neighborhood who are in jail or who are dead. It does take a certain strength to know your environment and say, 'I can grow beyond it.'

Obviously the Asian American community wants you to do well. They are cheering you on no matter what the circumstances.

If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans.

My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. Her grandmother was a slave, yet she was a college graduate in the Spellman class of 1917. She taught art for 50 years and she saved her Social Security checks for her children's education.

Post 9/11, brown people had this force pushing us together. It's like we're all being looked at with fear and suspicion; we're all being targeted, so how do you support yourself and your communities?

In all of my books, I really want to work with working-class people. My goal is to show the moments of grace and dignity in their lives.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

The lucky thing was that I was Italian; when the other Italians saw me fight back, they came to my defence.

If I didn't mould my reality then I'd still be in the ghetto where people like me are supposed to stay. You have to dream your way out of the nightmare.

Unless we labor to help others achieve a reasonable stake in society, we may find ourselves losing the society in which we have too great a stake.

'Option B' draws not just on my story but on the research and stories of many people overcoming all kinds of adversity. No one should have to go through challenges and trauma alone.

I still enjoy a lot of support from the black community.

What sets Iris Stevenson apart is her success in a system that in no way supports her - with the hardest possible children to convert.

I have always had faith in our community because I've seen us come together in so many ways before, even during the most difficult of times.

African-Americans and black immigrants share a resilience and a determination for a better life.

It's only when you get towards the top that people start throwing you down a rope. It's like a law of nature, and it makes me think a lot about what my responsibility is to folks who are further down the hole where I was - how I can offer them help and how I can try to help change the structure of American society.

I moved to Queens, New York, when I was seven and a half. I went to middle school in a foreign country, but I had so many different kinds of Americans push me along and encourage me. I was very odd. I didn't talk very well. We were poor, and we didn't have any connections, but people showed up and pushed me along.

Spanish Harlem is like every ghetto in America. There's every distraction possible. To make it up out of there is really a task itself.

We've always been about empowering people who feel like us and come from the communities that we come from and want to believe in our mission.

The coolest thing for me now is when I'm in the States and I meet other Asian-Americans who are like, 'Dude, thank you so much for doing what you do. I love your music, I love whatever. But whatever you do, we're gonna support you because there aren't many Asian faces doing music.'

One of the things I did in my book, I start off with, is explaining how great our grace was: the things we were able to accomplish after the first one-hundred years from slavery.

I think that the same kind of openness and fluidity and willingness to interrogate power that we, as feminists, expect from men in alliance on questions of class should also be the expectation that women of colour can rely upon with our white feminist allies.

I showed that once again a guy from the 'favela,' from the community, it taking over the world.

Maria did teach us a lot. It taught us to value what we have: our friends, our neighbors, and those who helped us. I know my people in PR are active. It took us by surprise, but we are warriors, and we are ready for any adversity.

You can't raise the aspirations of a child and then leave them hanging. Poverty can't be solved by a project. It's solved by a relationship, collaboration.