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I knew Stokely [Carmichael] and them, but when you got to that, you saw that Nina Simone started to take up their burden. She started to preach for them. She was taking on the burden of I want to tell the people.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Burden
Saws
Taking
Started
Knew
Tell
Take
Nina
People
Preach

More quotes by Nikki Giovanni

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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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I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office that's a different sense of who you are. I'm just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people I do not lead the people.
Nikki Giovanni
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School should be eleven months of the year.
Nikki Giovanni
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We black women are the single group in the West intact. And anybody can see we're pretty shaky. We are, however (all praises), the only group that derives its identity from itself.
Nikki Giovanni
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If you were a pure bolt of fire-cutting the skies I'd touch you-risking my life-not because I'm brave or strong, but because I'm fascinated by what the outcome would be.
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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Who I really am keeps surprising me.
Nikki Giovanni
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We love because it's the only true adventure.
Nikki Giovanni
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Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.
Nikki Giovanni
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We must invest in tomorrow. And pay our teachers for teaching as we pay our coaches for coaching.
Nikki Giovanni
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It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people.
Nikki Giovanni
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Everyone understands that love comes in many different packages and is used in many different ways. You cannot love beyond your years, nor can you fail to love beneath them... In other words, I think you get the love you need when you open your heart.
Nikki Giovanni
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Don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.
Nikki Giovanni
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School buildings should be opened and used twenty four hours a day.
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
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I am ever fascinated by the human experience and by, actually, human beings.
Nikki Giovanni
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Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor those who struggle are middle class.
Nikki Giovanni
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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.
Nikki Giovanni
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Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy
Nikki Giovanni
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I am proud of the hip hop generation. They are good business people and, actually, good people.
Nikki Giovanni