James McBride Quotes

We don't know who John Brown was, and in many ways, his work shaped where we are today. He was a Pennsylvanian. He was the prototypical Yankee who fought back and suffered in doing so.

John Brown was clearly flawed in real life. He did some terrible things, but he did some things none of us would have had the heart to do. His moral leanings were unquestionably admirable.

[John Brown's] zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun... I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave.

In those days…we were all friends – all willing to help one another…We were very radical, however, in our views of right and wrong…. We opposed bad men everywhere, supported all fugitive slaves who came to us, and worked like beavers for the right

I wish, when the coat wears out that Eugene Debs wore at his trial [for espionage in 1918], I could have a little piece of it to keep in my Bible.

I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for him.

I admit that there was a mistake. But I had my ideology. I wanted to free my country.

I am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned and bound for advocating African rights and I should deserve to be a slave myself if I shirked from that duty of danger.

Lincoln was one of history's greatest men, but Americans are not like him. He was a lonely exception.

Whenever he struck a blow for his own liberty he fought in open battle, and when at last he raised his black and humble hands that the shackles might be struck off, those hands were innocent of wrong against his helpless charges.

Heroism is a matter of choice.

I always showed myself in the face of day, asserting the liberty and independence of my country, while some others, like owls, courted concealment and were too much afraid of losing their roosts to leave them for such a cause.

John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.

The abolitionists were not like the rugged people out West, and they were not like John Brown, either. They were people who made speeches and did politics.

The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.

Nobody knows this, but my hero is Che Guevara. Why? Because he was magic. He was a hero. Che resisted. He fought against the system.

For me, only freedom fighters like Kartar Singh Sarabha and Bhagat Singh are my fathers.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a revolutionary, simple and plain.

I would prefer to be known as Richard the Lionhearted.

My late father Rev. James Thomas McGlowan was the inspiration behind 'Bamboozled.' My father admired Frederick Douglass' courage and his bravery in the face of adversity.

James McBride's 'The Good Lord Bird' is set in the mid-19th century and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave.

I jumped on the grenade that was thrown at myself and my friend. I don't recommend it.

Everybody that loves freedom loves Harriet Tubman because she was determined not only to be free, but to make free as many people as she could.

If some black man go out and start something, a riot or something or, I'm not going to jump in it and get killed because he's gone out and started something I don't believe in what he's fighting for or his approach.