Malcolm X

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Read absolutely everything you get your hands on because you'll never know where you'll get an idea from.

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​Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.

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I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

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A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.

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There is no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.

 

You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.

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I believe in the brotherhood of all men, but I don't believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn't want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two-way street.

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Truth is on the side of the oppressed.

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We must set a good example for our children and must teach them to always be ready to accept the responsibilities that are necessary for building good communities and nations. We must teach them that their greatest responsibilities are to themselves, to their families and to their communities.

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You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

 

Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.

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Stumbling is not falling.

 

You’ve got to get some power before you can be yourself.

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In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.

 

Freedom is essential to life itself. Freedom is essential to the development of the human being. If we don’t have freedom we can never expect justice and equality.

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To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.

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Chico Xavier

 

Though nobody can go back and make a new beginning . . . Anyone can start over and make a new ending.

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Yohji Yamamoto

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I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.

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With my eyes turned to the past, I walk backwards into the future.

 

William Butler Yeats

 

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

 

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

 

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

 

There is another world, but it is in this one.

 

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

 

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

 

Laurence Yep

 

I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what's special in ordinary things.

 

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

 

Poetry is like a bird; it ignores all frontiers.

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When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.

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I do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck-and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay-and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road.

 

Jane Yolen

 

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

 

Edward Young

 

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

 

Marguerite Yourcenar

 

Writing doesn’t require too much energy—it is a relaxation and a joy.

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Ofelia Zepeda

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We travel carrying our words.

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Molly Zhu

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​It’s one of the most exciting parts of experiencing the world: noticing things that are outlandish and seemingly not real (very similar to a dream). I think that’s how you understand hypocrisy and oxymoron and subversion and nuance and hatred and love, too. I think what I’m trying to say is: the world is weird and strange and it makes no sense. So many things about the natural way of our lives are simply bizarre. We would be so remiss not to notice and pay homage to this dynamic, especially in art.

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Zig Ziglar

 

Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.

 

Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.