Top 89 African Life Quotes
#1. The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear.
Paul Theroux
#2. History is the land-mark by which we are directed into the true course of life.
Marcus Garvey
#3. On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#4. I believe that we have reached a stage in life in the economic development of Africa where moving forward is perilous, moving backwards is cowardice and standing still is suicidal but we must persevere because winners do not quit and quitter never win.
Patrick L.O. Lumumba
#5. It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.
Felix Okoye
#6. I'm always telling people baseball needs to be more prominent in the African American community. What a better way to do so, going on these TV shows and appearing on the cover of this or that. Now kids can see how baseball can change your life. Frank Thomas did that for me.
Matt Kemp
#7. They say African Americans. I say black people. I've only been to Africa once. I've been in America all my life!
Herman Cain
#8. The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.
Randall Kennedy
#9. It is my deepest desire to share the worlds of people we don't often see or read about in media. With my writing I seek to introduce you to the worlds I've always known existed around me and within me.
Casey Curry
#10. If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.
Bill Gates
#11. Now I've devoted my life to making sure that I can be a trailblazer for any other African American kids or any other gay kids or any other kids that just feel weird or uncomfortable and have their own issues and don't know how to express themselves. I want to be like a beacon for those kids now.
Todrick Hall
#12. As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.
Coretta Scott King
#14. Consider the statistics that African American Males are stopped by the police more often, convicted for crimes more often and draw prison more often and draw longer prison sentences more often than their white counterparts.
The Prophet Of Life
#15. Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
V.S. Naipaul
#16. Every intelligent person whose life has been passed in a slaveholding State, and who has carefully observed the character and capacity of the African race, will see that a general and sudden emancipation would be absolute ruin to the Negroes, as well as to the white population.
Roger B. Taney
#17. I think that I learned music. And also you learn recommendations that you can use in your life. When you travel, you all the time remember what your mother teach you. You know in the African family the mother has a big role to play because the father is outside in the fields or going to work.
Baaba Maal
#18. My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.
Cory Booker
#19. I have been privileged to have the opportunity to work with many of African American fraternal and social organizations that are active in my congressional district. They all do important work that makes a tangible difference to the quality of life in our community.
Chris Van Hollen
#20. There's an African proverb: 'When death finds you, may it find you alive.' Alive means living your own damned life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.
Michael Meade
#21. Live life to the fullest and never forget the people that supported you along the way.
Dorothy W. Cosey
#22. In the African American community, we are very 'hush, hush' about things in our life.
Kym Whitley
#23. Everything in life has its price, and often the heaviest prices we pay are not in terms of money.
Raynetta Manees
#24. In any case how many took the oath and are now licking the toes of the whiteman?No, you take an oath to confirm a choice already made. The decision to lay or not lay your life for the people lies in the heart. The oath is the water sprinkled on a man's head at baptism
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
#25. I come from a world where the word 'trauma' doesn't exist, because we are too poor. I didn't have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn't all that bad.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#26. They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, "Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika," God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.
Alexander McCall Smith
#27. It's depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them.
George Carlin
#28. If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison
Sean Liburd
#29. I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
Jacques Derrida
#30. What constitutes misuse of the universe? This question can be answered in one word: greed ... . Greed constitutes the most grievous wrong. LAURENTI MAGESA, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life
Christopher Ryan
#31. What the White House is trying to do is racialize all politics and they're especially trying to tell the African-American voter that the GOP is against letting them have a chance at a good life in this economy, and that's just a complete lie,
Ben Stein
#32. Africa is not fulfilling people's hopes and aspirations. African leaders have not had an agenda that included governing Africa so that people would find their careers, their life, dreams and visions fulfilled here.
Ama Ata Aidoo
#33. I've got to where am in life not because of something I brought to the world but through something I found - the wealth of African culture.
Hugh Masekela
#34. When I was growing up, so many of the important changes for African-Americans were being made in the United States Supreme Court and were being made by lawyers. I followed the court very intensely and wanted to do that for my life.
Leah Ward Sears
#35. Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
Ben Okri
#36. I don't live my life as a writer. I'm a mother, an African-American woman, and I do everything that everybody else does - cook and a little bit of cleaning.
Terry McMillan
#37. My mother is a fighter. After she battled polio and learned to walk again, the doctors told her she would be a cripple her entire life. Instead of accepting defeat, she refused this fate and went on to become the West African Women's Singles tennis champion in college.
Uzo Aduba
#38. The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life.
Leopold Sedar Senghor
#39. Hardest of all for Europeans to negotiate are traditional African religions, whose transactions with unseen powers are central to the running of life in many areas, the main weapon in the struggle against the forces of evil.
Neil MacGregor
#40. Inside me I'm Ghanaian, and I'm proud to be African. But of course I'm Italian. I was born in Italy. I've never been to Africa in my life, but I will go one day.
Mario Balotelli
#41. And that makes us (black women) feel like we have spokespeople, because everybody we encounter feels they have a piece of you and can tell you how to live your life
Malebo Sephodi
#42. I'm a member of the African diaspora: my parents left the Caribbean and came to London for a better life.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste
#43. How do I negotiate my way across life with a system that I find so violent yet it seems so normal to many others?
Malebo Sephodi
#44. Our history is responsible for the differences in the South African way of life.
P. W. Botha
#45. The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle.
Nelson Mandela
#46. Southern states in the confederacy were not ready to give up their fight to secede or give up their way of life, which was made possible in large part through the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves.
Corrine Brown
#47. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#48. 'I wish for a better life. I wish for food for my children. I wish that sexual abuse and exploitation in schools would stop.' This is the dream of the African girl.
Leymah Gbowee
#49. The diversity lottery program is a proven method of offering a path to legal permanent status for residents of African nations and other underrepresented regions seeking a better life here in the United States.
Cedric Richmond
#50. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.
Soledad O'Brien
#51. One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a "function.
Paul Beatty
#52. Between the river in the mellow English landscape and the African mountain ridge, ran the path of this life ... The bowstring was released on the bridge at Eton, the arrow described its orbit, and hit the obelisk in the Ngong Hills.
Karen Blixen
#53. I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.
Athol Fugard
#54. I look white to a lot of people. And I'm not. I'm African-American. I'm mixed. I like to call myself Mulatto because that definition fits. So, you know, I've dealt with the conflict my whole life between how I look and my actual ethnic and racial identity.
Mat Johnson
#55. I will heighten my life by helping others heighten theirs
Les Brown
#56. The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.
Aberjhani
#57. Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.
Nadine Gordimer
#58. I think it's pretty dynamic. There's a lot of energy there and life, and you'll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they're listening in Spanish.
Michael Emerson
#60. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#61. I think it's a wonderful thing to have African-American characters. Look at life. It's not a white world or a black world; there are all kind of people in it. It's showing growth, and in today's world there are so many outlets.
Darius McCrary
#63. Remember that everyone's life is measured by the power that individual has to make the world better-this is all life is.
Booker T. Washington
#64. [Donald] Trump is going to appeal better to African Americans, Hispanics, and others than previous Republican candidates because he's talking about what they want: a fair chance to have a better life economically.
Jeff Sessions
#66. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?
Philip Dray
#67. Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
Nelson Mandela
#68. I write to breath life back into memory to remind African-Americans of our rich and textured history. I also see myself as a "root," and for me the "fierce winds" include the marginalization-the downright segregation-of literature written by people of color.
Bernice L. McFadden
#69. My African heritage is a part of reggae music roots, and the concept is that the album, 'Revelation Part 1: The Root of Life' is a tribute to roots reggae music. The fruit is what blossoms into different colors and shades, but the root has to stand predominant.
Stephen Marley
#70. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
James Baldwin
#71. Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.
Carolyn See
#72. There was a lot of feeling that with an African-American president, life on the South Side of Chicago would be radically different.
Mark Kirk
#73. I know I'm an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I'm not a jazz musician. I'm not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It's in between these areas.
Anthony Braxton
#75. As an African American actress, there are people who have been staples in my life that opened a door that I can walk through. I hope that I can have that impact.
Monique Coleman
#76. Because books saved my life, literally, I've become close to them
Malebo Sephodi
#77. Football gives the African people hope, a true motivation for their life.
Marcel Desailly
#78. To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after - there's a strong respect for that in African culture.
Anna Deavere Smith
#79. It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.
Luther E. Vann
#80. It was his experience that life worked under the same guidelines as a capitalistic society. In order to get what you wanted, it was usually necessary to give up something in return. Sometimes gaining what you defined as everything meant losing what you most needed.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#81. Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible's approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own.
Steven Pinker
#82. Well, what I will tell you is the support from the world - it's not just an African-American citizen. There are people of all different walks of life who are rallying behind the concerns with the that Sandy was treated because what that says to me is that this is an American issue.
Sharon Cooper
#83. Fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge. Only Fools despise wisdom and discipline.
Proverbs 1:7 NLT
Eddie Johnson
#84. Many Africans are used to a life where they get up in the morning and don't know what they're going to do that day.
Mo Ibrahim
#85. In Marrakech, Arabian open-heartedness is served up with a generous dose of pan-African mysticism, a dollop of French savoir-vivre, and a garnish of Moorish grace. The vibe is irresistible to meaning-of-life seekers and international hipsters looking for a scene.
Vivian Swift
#87. I don't think people have been able to deal with the fact that African American filmmakers can make movies about life and relationships.
Tim Robbins
#88. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.
Eric Foner
#89. When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.
Lee Grant
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