Top 100 African People Quotes
#1. A genocide in Africa has not received the same attention that genocide in Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in other part of the world. There is still this kind of basic discrimination against the African people and the African problems.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
#2. Forgiveness is the most important thing. We all have to forgive what was done to us - the Irish people have to forgive. The African people. The Jewish people. We all have to forgive and understand the only way to stop the cycle of hate and abuse is not to allow yourself to get caught in it.
Sinead O'Connor
#3. African people worldwide are known to be welcoming and open-minded.
Jill Scott
#4. Colonialists stole not only the lands of African people and renamed them. They stole also their knowledge, so that they would know nothing about themselves
Motsoko Pheko
#5. Many African people are smarter than me - kids who could have been better. I have no claim for genius.
Mo Ibrahim
#6. I am very proud to be African. I want to defend African people, and I want to show to the world that African players can be as good as the Europeans and South Americans.
Yaya Toure
#7. Our cultural roots are the most ancient in the world. The spiritual concepts of our Ancestors gave birth to religious thought African people believe in the oneness of the African family through sacred time, which unites the past, the present and the future. Our Ancestors live with us.
Marimba Ani
#8. Bill Clinton is like a lot of white politicians. They eat soul food, they party with black women, they play the saxophone, but when it comes to domestic and foreign policy, they make the same decisions that are destructive to African people in this country and throughout the world.
Sister Souljah
#9. It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#10. Football gives the African people hope, a true motivation for their life.
Marcel Desailly
#11. The African people and tribal chiefs are hospitable, and African music and dances are invigorating.
Li Keqiang
#12. So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.
Taiye Selasi
#13. Improving Africa's farming sector would have multiple positive outcomes for African people.
Richard Attias
#14. African people need to stop shouting 'nationtime' until they are clear about the responsibilities of running a nation.
John Henrik Clarke
#15. But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.
Nelson Mandela
#16. Sometimes she thought that the people overseas had no room in their heart for Africa, because nobody had ever told them that African people were just the same as they were
Alexander McCall Smith
#17. I'm not so Pro-Israel'I'm Pro-Africa. Africa's greatest enemy of all time is the Arab Muslim Empire'they enslaved us for one thousand years and have committed untold atrocities and genocides against the East African people.
Kola Boof
#18. All through the ages the African people have made efforts to deliver themselves from oppressive forces.
Wangari Maathai
#19. I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
John Henrik Clarke
#20. People called rock & roll 'African music.' They called it 'voodoo music.' They said that it would drive the kids insane. They said that it was just a flash in the pan - the same thing that they always used to say about hip-hop.
Little Richard
#21. 'Revelations' is one of the most important pieces to the African American arts. It assesses the hope and despair of a people and overcoming the struggle with our faith.
Robert Battle
#22. I want to introduce my readers to people they may never have met, take them places they may never have visited, and present them with situations they may never have encountered.
J. Everett Prewitt
#23. Crisis' seems to be too mild a word to describe conditions in countless African-American communities. It is beyond crisis when in the richest nation in the world, African Americans in Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations of the world.
Johnnetta B. Cole
#24. When people see Barack Obama, they don't necessarily see an African-American president. They see someone who is a child of immigrants. They see someone whose family has worked hard and struggled. And they see many similarities between themselves and Barack Obama.
Grace Meng
#25. Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that works, but one that works for the American people.
Donald Trump
#26. For us who are now in power, we need to be challenged to serve the people and ignore our own egos and personal interests so that we can really demonstrate to other African states that it is possible to share power without going to war.
Wangari Maathai
#27. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#28. I think there is a big difference between expressing the pain and anger that many African Americans and other people of color may feel versus language that I think now crosses the line and goes into hate.
Michael Nutter
#29. To take part in the African revolution, it is not enough to write a revolutionary song. You must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves.
Ahmed Sekou Toure
#30. It takes time for brown people and people of different ethnicities to get into the Hollywood world, which is predominantly Caucasian and African American.
Utkarsh Ambudkar
#31. And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In
Mat Johnson
#32. Housing programs designed to help young families and senior citizens purchase homes should be available to people of all races, including African Americans.
Loretta Lynch
#33. Up to here, in general, we have mainly stuffed the brain of the young people with a indigestible multitude of varios notions, without thinking about enough of the prime necessity to form their character.
African Spir
#34. I never said I wasn't Black ... I want to make that very clear. I said, I am not African-American. I never expected my personal beliefs and comments to spark such emotion in people. I think it is only positive when we can openly discuss race and being labeled in America.
Raven-Symone
#35. I love dressing up. I'm from a huge African family and grew up in a really colorful place. The way I dress reflects my environment and wanting to take people into a fantasy world for half an hour.
Shingai Shoniwa
#36. Many people believe that determining who is 'black' is rather easy, a task simplified by the administration of the one-drop rule. Under the one-drop rule, any discernible African ancestry stamps a person as 'black.'
Randall Kennedy
#38. One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
Herbie Hancock
#39. I'd be happy if people said that I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music.
Ahmet Ertegun
#40. A lot of people don't realize that hair is a big thing for a lot of people, not just African-American women. It's something to be aware of and to be cautious of.
Zendaya
#41. I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.
Spike Lee
#42. Educational opportunities have supported the rise of the African middle class, the professional cadre of young people who are now willing and able to contribute to Africa's future prosperity.
Mo Ibrahim
#43. I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.
Queen Latifah
#45. At the same, we need to remain sensitive to the reality that we are still an African society in which the majority of the people and communities live under severe deprivations and afflictions that are no fault of theirs.
Ibrahim Babangida
#46. There are individuals who are working very hard to promote fear and antagonism towards Islam and Muslims in this country. It's fueled, in part, by the first African-American president that we have. Obama's father was a Muslim and people have used this to arouse hostility against him.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
#47. There aren't enough people in the media creation space. There aren't enough people making premium quality programming. That's how we change the narrative. Because there is a lot of bad African programming out there, and it is not helping matters.
Mo Abudu
#48. I don't buy the argument that there can't be a successful independent candidacy for the presidency of the United States. People who say, 'It can't happen,' are many of the same people who said we'd never elect an African American.
Mark McKinnon
#49. If you're Native American and you pray to the wolves, you're a savage. If you're African and you pray to your ancestors, you're a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that's just common sense.
Trevor Noah
#50. I stay connected in my head. I'm spiritually and psychologically connected to African-Americans. They are my people, and that will never change.
Assata Shakur
#51. The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They're covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it's all stopped here. Well, it hasn't, and the one thing they're not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there's no way these people can be saved - none.
Larry Kramer
#52. Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. ... We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it's no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.
Bryan Fischer
#53. For people of color - especially African Americans - the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.
Tim Wise
#54. The commitment to literacy was constant on the part of African Americans. And the percentages of literacy by the end of the century, by 1900, basic literacy has galloped ahead. People believed that education, of course, was the turnstile for advancement.
David Levering Lewis
#55. Don't you know sugar is brown first? White folks couldn't stand the fact that something so sweet shared the same color as the people who cut the cane, slopped the hogs and picked the cotton. So they bleached it to resemble them, and now they done gone and fooled everybody. You included.
Bernice L. McFadden
#56. The reason I'm in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don't envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.
Athol Fugard
#57. 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
#58. Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels.
Wilbur Smith
#59. People of color, particularly African Americans, feel the stigma more keenly. In a race-conscious society, some don't want to be perceived as having yet another deficit.
Bebe Moore Campbell
#60. At its core, black theology is predicated on the assertion that God has a unique relationship with African Americans. God is not a passive bystander in human history but rather an active participant in the struggles of oppressed and dispossessed people.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry
#61. Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control, a system in which over 50% of young African-American kids are unemployed, it is estimated that a black baby born today has a one in four chance of ending up in the criminal justice system.
Bernie Sanders
#62. 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
#63. As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime or even in their children's lifetime or even in their grandchildren's lifetime. So fatalism isn't really an option.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#64. Some people think African states cannot be trusted with the cookie jar. But there are absolutely good NGOs who have this feeling of human solidarity and who also recognize that their work can only be supplementary to the government.
Meles Zenawi
#65. These same people who accuse Planned Parenthood of 'targeting' African-American children, they care about you only while you're in the womb. The minute you crown, you're on your own.
Gwen Moore
#67. I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look Africa; and yet here I still was.
Alexandra Fuller
#68. He doesn't tell Aunt Fostalina she looks good, like I've heard other people do; he tells her she looks like sunrise.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#69. I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.
Nadine Gordimer
#70. The people I mixed with in Monaco didn't relate to my South African mentality or humor ... Although I have met some wonderful people since I've been living in Monaco, I regard them all as acquaintances. I only have two people I consider friends here.
Charlene, Princess Of Monaco
#71. Homicide through gun violence is the leading cause of death among young African American males in the United States. If people look a certain way, they have a higher tendency of dying, of having their lives taken away.
Ryan Coogler
#73. So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.
Henry Louis Gates
#74. 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
#75. The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.
Bernie Sanders
#76. People can graduate from beauty school and know everything about white hair and nothing about African-American hair.
Tracie Thoms
#77. I love writing for other actors, women of African descent and people who are generally underrepresented.
Danai Gurira
#78. The only pool of young people lies in Saudi Arabia, some of the Middle-East countries, and few African countries. But they are not prepared as Indians are ... we travel well; we are accepted globally very well, and that makes India truly a place to source world's workforce.
Sunil Mittal
#79. You know Latin people? African-American people? How our skin ages more slowly? Even though we're dramatic, we move our faces, we eat higher-fat foods, we're the ones with fewer wrinkles - it makes you wonder.
Salma Hayek
#80. Black(people) hold onto their God just as the drunken man holds on to the street lamp post - for physical support only.
Tai Solarin
#81. First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.
Carlos Santana
#82. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#83. We have more people in jail than any other country in Earth, disproportionately Latino and African-American.
Bernie Sanders
#84. Slave masters thought they were making a difference in black people's lives too. Saving them from their "wild African ways." Same shit, different century. I wish people like them would stop thinking that people like me need saving.
Angie Thomas
#85. South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.
J.M. Coetzee
#86. Some black people want to get in touch with their African roots. But then you got some black people that just don't give a damn. You tell them, 'Hey, I just got back from the motherland.' They're like, 'Where'd you go - Detroit? Did you see The Temptations?'
Wanda Sykes
#87. It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#88. When will we address the fact that rich, white people think they know what's in the best interest of children of African-Americans and Latinos - no matter what the parent's income or education level.
Karen Lewis
#89. I think that we, as the African-American men in hip-hop, we have a greater responsibly because we have the ears of so many millions of our young people. And they listenin'.
Steve Harvey
#90. We're African-American and we work together as a family, so people assume we're like the Jacksons. But I didn't have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.
Beyonce Knowles
#91. I think a lot of people have a problem with the fact that I've adopted an African child, a child who has a different color skin than I do.
Madonna Ciccone
#92. As long as many of our people still live in utter poverty, as long as children still live under plastic covers, as long as many of our people are still without jobs, no South African should rest and wallow in the joy of freedom.
Nelson Mandela
#93. Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don't belong anymore to anyone, that I'm not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.
Muhammad Ali
#94. The photos were taken by African Union soldiers. People in Congress saw them. I thought if people could see them, there would be public outcry. No one would be able to say, We just didn't know what was going on there.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#95. An old African leader says about leadership, he says that leadership should never be shared; it should always remain in the hands of the dispossessed people. We will lead the revolution.
H. Rap Brown
#96. You know, I'm an African-American quarterback. That may scare a lot of people because they - they haven't seen nothing that they can compare me to.
Cam Newton
#97. He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.
Colson Whitehead
#98. Michael Joseph Jackson's genius was the ability to be the raw article himself - the real article himself. He is part of the African American people who were marginalized.
Michael Eric Dyson
#99. African history is filled with experiences of people shooting their way to power and then splintering into factions, like in Somalia and Liberia.
George Ayittey
#100. I sometimes wish I were African American because people don't bash them afterward. It's the hardest to be a woman.
Julie Delpy
