Quote

History is like a clock, it tells you your time of day.

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
Clock
Tells
History
Time
Like

More quotes by John Henrik Clarke

Image
If you expect the present day school system to give history to you, you are dreaming. This, we have to do ourselves. The Chinese didn't go out in the world and beg people to teach Chinese studies or let them teach Chinese studies. The Japanese didn't do that either. People don't beg other people to restore their history they do it themselves.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
In a collective society, everybody's business is everybody's business.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
Your group has a right and responsibility to preside over your behavior and you have a responsibility to make that behavior in a manner that does not endanger the group.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
You look at a clock and it tells you it's eight o'clock, you know the number of hours that has been before eight you know the number of hours you've got after eight. You can now measure your time to see if you can get done a number of things you've got to get done. History serves the same purpose.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
What we might have been dealing with here - with the building of the Pyramids - is an age that got lost. Man had to learn again what they previously had known.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
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
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
I say if black people don't unite and begin to support themselves, their communities and their families, they might as well begin to go out of business as a people. Nobody's going to have any mercy. And nobody's going to have any compunction about making slaves out of them.
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
When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'
John Henrik Clarke
Image
In a matrilineal society, a woman has basic rights that no one has to grant her but you can't take it away from her because the society is based on the concept that the lifegiver is equal to those she gave the life to. And that will remain... until you find a pregnant man.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
I have no faith in much organized religion because I think it's by a bunch of hypocrites and practiced by a bunch of hypocrites. They don't mean what they say because all of them are in the slave trade one way or the other.
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
We're in a world of propaganda. Some of it is all to effective.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
The one thing you never integrate at the ruin of your own pleasure is your institutions.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
What I have learned is that a whole lot of people with degrees don't know a damn thing, and a lot of people with no degrees are brilliant.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south. They destroyed the great independent states in West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western slave trade and the Arabs were in the slave trade before Islam and they are still in the slave trade.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
In order to have a charismatic leader, you have to have a charismatic program. Because if you have a charismatic program, then if you can read you can lead. When the leader gets killed while you're reading from page 13 of your charismatic program, you can bury the man with honors, then continue the plan by reading from page 14. Let's keep on.
John Henrik Clarke
Image
All life is a test one way or the other.
John Henrik Clarke