You can take the girl out of the school, but you can't take the school out of the girl.

I remember when we used to sit in the government yard in Trenchtown...
In this bright future, you can't forget your past...
Oh, little darling...oh little sister...
Don't shed no tears...
No woman, no cry

On your way up, please take me up; and on your way down, don't let me down.

One good thing about music, when it hits you you feel no pain.

One monkey don't stop the whole show.

Sometimes it hurt - ah, I can't deny it. But then I would tell myself, uh-uh, that's not the eye for you to look through. Look through another eye. Rastafari.

Bob was one of a kind and truly a prophet sent...I didn't wait until he passed to give him flowers.

Listen, Rita. You see this circle, this is like life, where we have to go around different places and meet different people. But inside this circle, this is where we are, you and me. And you see this line that go around it? Nobody can break that line to come into the circle with you and me, it's protected. This is me, this is you, this is the children, all the important people are inside this ring. Anything happens outside it doesn't have a proper meaning, and nothing can get inside. So don't worry yourself, man, you are safe, you are my queen, my wife, my life.

Listen, man. Just cool.

On the surface you are smiling, but underneath you boil, and when you have to, you roar.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear for atomic energy,
'Cause none of them can stop the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look? Ooh!
Some say it's just a part of it:
We've got to fulfill the book.

Won't you help to sing

These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have;
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.

The pro-slavery men had claimed that slavery was a humane institution that rescued Africans from barbarity in their homelands. Africans would simply kill each other in tribal wars if they were not liberated in the Americas, where they enjoyed the civilizing influence of Christianity.

It was almost impossible to get into Africa, but easy to be taken out.

Most people I had met in the Colonies - any people at all, who had not themselves been stolen from Africa - imagined that captives had been scooped up on the coast. It made me think once more of the men who had drawn elephants and lions on their maps of Africa. They had no idea who we were, how we lived, or how strong we had been just to make it to the Colonies.

Redemption is invented by the sinner.

You have the face of someone born in this land, but you come with the toubabu. You are a toubab with a black face.

Personally, I concluded that no place in the world was entirely safe for an African, and that for many of us, survival depended on perpetual migration.

We are travelling peoples.

The United States: there was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains.

This "Map of Africa" was not my homeland. It was a white man's fantasy.

From my homeland the buckra were taking both gold and people, and using one to buy and sell the other.

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter; in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

I am not a white man. I am a Jew, and that is very different. You and I are both outsiders.

Got a slave mama, then you is slave. Got a slave daddy, then you is slave. Any nigger in you at all, then you is slave as clear as day.

Today you live, child. Tomorrow, you dream.

And my story waits like a restful beast.

Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers, and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.

So geographers, in Afric-maps,
With savage-pictures fill their gaps;
And o'er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.

I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life. (Deuteronomy 30:19)