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If I can't do what I want to do, then my job is to not do what I want to do. It's not the same thing, but it's the best thing I can do.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Jobs
Best
Thing

More quotes by Nikki Giovanni

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Baseball is already the world's most tranquil sport. It is probably the only active sport where you are not seriously required to be alive to play.
Nikki Giovanni
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Black Americans should be given credit for finding probably the perfect weapon the weapon of the song. And that song continues. Most holocausts don't, so they have this bitterness left over. The phenomenon of the world, as far as Black Americans are considered, is that we are not a bitter people.
Nikki Giovanni
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Facts are only tools to gain control over yourself and other people.
Nikki Giovanni
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I have not tried to tell the people anything. I have shared my views with the people but I have not tried to lead or correct them, assuming they need correction.
Nikki Giovanni
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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.
Nikki Giovanni
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I am of the generation of segregation. Black Lives Matter is post. I said today, and I will say all the time, If Nina [Simone] were here, she'd have her Black Lives Matter [T-shirt] on. I think they're great kids. They don't need me or anybody else to tell them what to do.
Nikki Giovanni
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White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.
Nikki Giovanni
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Rage is to writers what water is to fish.
Nikki Giovanni
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The job of the architect becomes more difficult in this secular age. Where once he had a god to extol, he now has humans like himself where once he had he, he now has she and they.
Nikki Giovanni
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We obviously need the truth. We're living in a country of lies.
Nikki Giovanni
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Some say we are responsible for those we love. Others know we are responsible for those who love us.
Nikki Giovanni
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We all have our muses. My grandmother and my mother are the people I write for. I'll never have to worry about who buys my work, or who likes it, and who doesn't. The people who I want to be proud of me already are.
Nikki Giovanni
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and sometimes I sit down at my typewriter and I think not of someone cause there isn't anyone to think about and i wonder is it worth it
Nikki Giovanni
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We [Black people] have always used our creativity to battle and we're not the only ones. Black Americans are certainly leaders in that simply because we were denied education and dealt with enforced illiteracy. But people seem to always forget that literacy is not the only way of learning things or conveying knowledge.
Nikki Giovanni
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Black love is black wealth
Nikki Giovanni
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I appreciate and enjoy my age.
Nikki Giovanni
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There are things you stand up for because it’s right.
Nikki Giovanni
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Who I am really keeps surprising me.
Nikki Giovanni
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We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be.
Nikki Giovanni
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Everybody that loves freedom loves Harriet Tubman because she was determined not only to be free, but to make free as many people as she could.
Nikki Giovanni