Quote

In a collective society, everybody's business is everybody's business.

John Henrik Clarke

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Henrik Clarke
Age: 83 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 1
Died: 1998
Died: July 16
Historian
Writer
Union Springs
Alabama
John Clarke
Everybody
Society
Business
Collectives
Collective

More quotes by John Henrik Clarke

Image
This kind of collective society - giving to each according to his need - existed in Africa not only before Karl Marx, but also before Europe.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
Each generation must assume the responsibility of securing their manhood, their womanhood, the definition of their being on earth that in the final analysis is nationhood.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
What has been imposed on religion is not religion itself but the custom of those who have been converted to it. I think that the most atrocious of all of this is Islam. They were in the slave trade before Islam. The Arabs were natural slave traders. They were the people who were called on to conquer us, unfortunately.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
In the African matrilineal society, the lineage of the bloodline comes down through the female side. The Arabs who invaded East Africa and other parts of Africa reversed it to the patrilineal where everything comes down through the male side and the woman has no basic rights except that which the male is willing to grant her.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
The people and the cultures of what is known as Africa are older than the word 'Africa.' According to most records, old and new, Africans are the oldest people on the face of the earth. The people now called Africans not only influenced the Greeks and the Romans, they influenced the early world before there was a place called Europe.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
To control a people you must first control what they think about themselves and how they regard their history and culture. And when your conqueror makes you ashamed of your culture and your history, he needs no prison walls and no chains to hold you.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
You shouldn't bear humiliations.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
The African had opinions about the universe that eventually turned out to be true.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
My daddy wanted me to be a farmer feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
Anytime you turn on your own concept of God, you are no longer a free man. No one needs to put chains on your body, because the chains are on your mind.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
I don't attend any particular church now. I don't believe in denominations, nor do I believe in organized religion.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
We never see ourselves as heroes and sometimes when we do it is a hero that has made a fortune as a clown or a boxer. And there is no lasting value in either one of those.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
There has been a struggle to reclaim the African self. That struggle has been on the part of a minority of dedicated African-Americans who never gave up our African identity at no time during our stay here.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
We're in a world of propaganda. Some of it is all to effective.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are but, more importantly, what they must be.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
We 've lost something else: the relationship between men and women.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
I think that you're just as close to Jesus if you use the equipment he gave you other than to call on him to do for you what you can do for yourself.
John Henrik Clarke