Quote

Why are we mute? Where are our leaders, our legislators? Where is the church?

Harry Belafonte

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Harry Belafonte
Age: 97
Born: 1927
Born: March 1
Actor
Peace Activist
Recording Artist
Singer
Songwriter
Television Actor
Harlem
New York
King of Calypso
Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.
Legislators
Mute
Leaders
Leader
Church

More quotes by Harry Belafonte

Image
Since I have escaped the harshness of the economic bounds of poverty, I have stayed very connected to it spiritually. I reside and live and go and socialize and exist among those who suffer daily from the relationship that they have to poverty, Black men and women who are incarcerated. Actually, all people who are incarcerated, not just Black.
Harry Belafonte
Image
Do not submit. It is extremely critical that repression be met full head-on and that it be resisted with every fiber in our being. There is just absolutely no compromise that can be made with it.
Harry Belafonte
Image
Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich. Color does not necessarily denote quality, content or value. If a black is a tyrant, he is first and foremost a tyrant, then he incidentally is black. Bush is a tyrant and if he gathers around him black tyrants, they all have to be treated as they are being treated.
Harry Belafonte
Image
Wherever I found resistance to oppression, whether in Africa, in Latin America, certainly here in America in the South, I joined that resistance. I took part in the labor movement, in social movements, in the church community. I felt that it was the honorable thing to do and still do.
Harry Belafonte
Image
From the point of view of the poor, the hungry, the disenfranchised, the wretched of the Earth... there will never be peace until their condition has been alleviated and until their humanity is in full bloom.
Harry Belafonte
Image
In the gun game, we are the most hunted. The river of blood that washes the streets of our nation flows mostly from the bodies of our black children.
Harry Belafonte
Image
The sham engineers of the music industry, who steer the wheels of public opinion, are driving the good features of calypso into the ground. I shudder to think what these greedy men will eventually do to this true art form.
Harry Belafonte
Image
If I've impacted on one heart, one mind, one soul, and brought to that individual a greater truth than that individual came into a relationship with me having, then I would say that I have been successful.
Harry Belafonte
Image
When I was 40 and looking at 60, it seemed like a thousand miles away. But 62 feels like a week and a half away from 80. I must now get on with those things I always talked about doing but put off.
Harry Belafonte
Image
Terrorism is in many, many ways the final utterance of voices unheard.
Harry Belafonte
Image
Poverty continues to exist. Its appearance seems to be relentless in evidencing itself not only to all the things we experience here in America, but certainly what we see globally. And I don't see anywhere any philosophical analysis that suggests we know how to get out of this.
Harry Belafonte
Image
Colin Powell's committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.
Harry Belafonte
Image
More than once my mother would point out: Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet.
Harry Belafonte
Image
You can cage the singer but not the song.
Harry Belafonte
Image
Although we had a lot of villainy here in America, Adolf Hitler was certainly the most visible illustration of what would happen if fascism went unchallenged.
Harry Belafonte
Image
Where is the raised voice of black America? Why are we mute?
Harry Belafonte
Image
The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.
Harry Belafonte
Image
I've always been supportive of the right of Israel as a state, and I've always fought against anti-Semitism, even in my own community.
Harry Belafonte
Image
Turning against the church I also had to turn against a lot of the teachings of people in my family who were very much of the church and caught in it, and every time I turned to find where resides the good in the church, all I saw was the demonic, the Lucifer of the journey.
Harry Belafonte
Image
I became an anti-fascist, and the more I saw what was happening to the peoples of Europe, the Jews, the more I saw the deep cruelty and inhumanity of that system and its philosophy of white supremacy.
Harry Belafonte