Toni Cade Bambara

"We are our grandmothers' prayers, and we are our grandmothers' struggles."

"Don't you ever stop being the person you are, just because the world doesn't understand."

"The moment we stop fighting for each other is the moment we stop being human."

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

"We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society."

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"To know ourselves as a people is to know our history."

"We cannot heal what we are not willing to see."

"The most important thing is to love ourselves fiercely, and from that place, love the world."

"Revolution is a process, not an event."

"We must be warriors in the truest sense—for ourselves and for others."

"Literature is the most accessible of the arts, and therein lies its power."

"The future is in our hands if we're willing to claim it."

"Resistance is not futile; it is essential."

"We are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves and each other."

"To be alive is to be accountable to others."

"The personal is political, and the political is personal."

"Community is not something you join; it's something you build."

"We cannot afford the luxury of despair."

"Truth-telling is a revolutionary act."

"The work of art is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed."

"We must learn to see ourselves in each other's struggles."

"Knowledge without action is merely information."

"The greatest inheritance we can leave is a liberated consciousness."

"To create is to resist."

"We are all teachers; we are all learners."

"The power of naming things is the power to transform them."

"Beauty exists in resistance, in struggle, in persistence."

"Time is a currency we cannot afford to waste on despair."

"We must be ruthless in our honesty with ourselves."