Manning Marable Quotes

In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave.

I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.

The young very seldom lead anything in our country today. It's been quite some time since a younger generation pushed an older one to a higher standard.

Racism been over. It's the old people that keep on holding on to it.

We have to ask ourselves why younger women don't feel the need to be right up front with their politics. Is that going to set us back or is that itself a sign of progress? I don't know the answer.

Everyone matures. When I was Newt's age, I thought I had the right answer to things. The baby-boomers as political leaders are still on trial by the American people.

Orrin Hatch is old enough to be my father, and I don't want my father running the United States Senate Finance Committee.

The more entrenched a party in power becomes, the less likely it is to allow the kind of diversity in views that helped it achieve power in the first place.

There is a huge failure of Arab leadership not only on the issue of peace (with Israel) but also on reform.

I do not want a one-term Labor Government that dazzles for a moment and ends in disillusion. I want a Labor Government that governs for a generation and changes Britain for good.

We live in a time of mediocre leadership—political and intellectual.

Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by which they have once won office.

I keep telling these millennials it's all about them to get into politics and start making things happen. They don't care about whether or not someone is gay. They don't care to see contraception taken away or want to even discuss it. They're going forward, not backward.

Major political parties have a role, but they are incapable of initiating fundamental change because they are fundamentally tied to the status quo. They are the status quo.

I think Millennials are more progressive, more socially progressive, much more concerned about economic issues that impact the poor and middle class, and so that basically shows me that the Democratic party will have a bright future.

The older generations are too wedded to political parties, too wedded to romantic memories of what education was like when they were kids, and too wedded to the status quo group that clings to power.

The Democrat Party have no education in critical thinking or common sense or common sense perception. None of it. They just seethe when they hear this stuff because it's all creating knee-jerk reactions: "Racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe! Racist, sexist, bigot! Racist!" It's paralyzing us, folks, as a country. We are in a state of paralyses. These people are retarding our progress.

It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.

Men have slow reflexes. In general it takes several generations later for them to understand.

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die.

What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity.

My generation is one of the first generations of "choiceful" women - women who have actually had the choice of how they architect their lives - and I don't think shame should have any place in that. But as that generation, you get cuts and bruises.

There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.

The most depressing thing is the political slogan: there is no alternative. But there is.

If the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set. The monarchy is mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go. There is so much else in the world that is more interesting.