Top 77 June Jordan Quotes
#1. If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.
June Jordan
#2. The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.
June Jordan
#3. Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.
June Jordan
#4. And if i
if i ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate i o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
(from i must become a menace to my enemies)
June Jordan
#5. If we even tolerate any oppression of gay and lesbian Americans, if we join those who would intrude upon the choices of our hearts, then who among us shall be free?
June Jordan
#6. Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.
June Jordan
#7. The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what's given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.
June Jordan
#8. One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!
June Jordan
#9. So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
June Jordan
#10. I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.
June Jordan
#11. Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.
June Jordan
#13. I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind and my body and my soul
June Jordan
#14. We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.
June Jordan
#15. The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.
June Jordan
#16. To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.
June Jordan
#17. Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
June Jordan
#18. As I think about anyone or anything
whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film
as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?
June Jordan
#19. Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good ...
June Jordan
#20. Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.
June Jordan
#21. Buddy and Angela keep track of daytime just by figuring out the last and next time they will come together and how long alone. They become the heated habit of each other.
June Jordan
#22. Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?
June Jordan
#23. I am the history of the rejection of who I am
June Jordan
#24. A man is not a tree' ... If we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.
June Jordan
#25. To believe is to become what you believe.
June Jordan
#26. Sometimes we become so sophisticated we have to read the New York Times in order to figure out whether it's a hot or a rainy day.
June Jordan
#27. And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.
June Jordan
#28. I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.
June Jordan
#29. I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life
June Jordan
#30. Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.
June Jordan
#31. The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
June Jordan
#32. In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
June Jordan
#33. If any of us hopes to survive, she must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.
June Jordan
#34. I am a woman searching for her savagery
even if it's doomed
June Jordan
#35. As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.
June Jordan
#36. Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis: open, relentless, and on time! She is as radiant, she is as true, as that invincible sunrise she means means means to advance With all of the faith and all of the grace of her entirely devoted life.
June Jordan
#37. I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
June Jordan
#38. As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth - whatever the truth may be - that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.
June Jordan
#39. It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.
June Jordan
#40. I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
June Jordan
#41. My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.
June Jordan
#42. Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?
June Jordan
#43. A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.
June Jordan
#44. This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.
June Jordan
#45. I am a woman. And I am seeking an attitude. I am trying to find reasons for pride.
June Jordan
#46. Reproductive choice is not some trendy item to toss or keep around the house. If you cannot get an education or a job, if you cannot choose what will or will not happen with your own body, then what freedom do you have?
June Jordan
#47. There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
June Jordan
#48. And then I understood that the answer is yes, yes yes: I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.
June Jordan
#49. I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.
June Jordan
#50. My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair.
June Jordan
#51. Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie.
June Jordan
#52. I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me
June Jordan
#53. Suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: there is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you - who you really are - do survive.
June Jordan
#54. In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.
June Jordan
#55. Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?
June Jordan
#56. If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable.
June Jordan
#57. That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.
June Jordan
#58. Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.
June Jordan
#59. And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:
we are the ones we have been waiting for.
June Jordan
#61. Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few.
June Jordan
#62. But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.
June Jordan
#63. The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity
the incredibly outgoing energy
of righteous rage.
June Jordan
#64. This is the meaning of poverty: when you have nothing better to do than to hate somebody who, just exactly like yourself, has nothing better to do than to pick on you instead of trying to figure out how come there's nothing better to do.
June Jordan
#65. The histories of Blacks and Jews in bondage and out of bondage, have been blood histories pursued through our kindred searchings for self-determination. Let this blood be a stain of honor that we share. Let us not now become enemies to ourselves and to each other.
June Jordan
#66. To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.
June Jordan
#67. The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.
June Jordan
#68. We survive our love because we go on loving.
June Jordan
#69. the problem of gender identity is our evasion of the implications of power and our may-I-say-"feminine" inclinations to make nice. War is not nice.
June Jordan
#70. The United States Supreme Court, once a reliable if ultimate recourse for progressive and even revolutionary grievances, has become a retrograde wellspring for enormous economic and social distress.
June Jordan
#71. If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here.
June Jordan
#72. Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires ...
June Jordan
#73. CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.
June Jordan
#74. What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?
June Jordan
#75. Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
June Jordan
#76. What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.
June Jordan
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