Top 43 Makeba Quotes
#1. My first introduction to African music was by my mother, who bought the 'Pata Pata' album by the great Miriam Makeba when it came out. Now that is an album. What a voice.
Henry Rollins
#2. I have a camp so I brought my writers, LaShawn Daniels and at the time, Anesha and Antea [Birchett], they were sisters, and this girl Delisha [Thomas] and Makeba [Riddick]. I brought basically five writers to work on different ideas. You either make the cut or you don't.
Rodney Jerkins
#3. Age is wisdom if one has lived ones life properly.
Miriam Makeba
#4. In the mind, in the heart, I was always home. I always imagined, really, going back home.
Miriam Makeba
#5. But if you are going to wear blinders then you do not know the world.
Miriam Makeba
#6. In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land,
Miriam Makeba
#7. My thoughts are like quick little fish that swim out of my grasp.
Miriam Makeba
#8. The tragedy of civil wars in countries like Angola and Mozambique is that they left many civilians maimed. Poverty is the reason HIV/AIDS spread so rapidly in the African townships and slums. Poverty is the real killer.
Miriam Makeba
#9. Age is getting to know all the ways the world turns, so that if you cannot turn the world the way you want, you can at least get out of the way so you won't get run over.
Miriam Makeba
#10. I have to go and say farewell to all the countries that I have been to, if I can. I am 73 now, it is taxing on me.
Miriam Makeba
#11. I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.
Miriam Makeba
#12. Africa has her mysteries, and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them
Miriam Makeba
#13. Belafonte sent his people to pick me up and I went back and shook his hand, then went back to my little flat. I was very happy to have met a president of the United States - little me!
Miriam Makeba
#14. Well there is a lot of work here for younger and older musicians now. Our Ministry of Culture has now really embarked on changing things for artists, and it is getting much better. We just have to organize ourselves as artists, and then things will be better.
Miriam Makeba
#15. There are three things I was born with in this world, and there are three things I will have until the day I die-hope, determination, and song.
Miriam Makeba
#17. [Belafonte] was a good teacher and looked after me. He said, 'You have such great talent, you must try not to be a tornado - be like a submarine. It was good advice when I found myself speaking at the UN Committee Against Apartheid and then the UN General Assembly.
Miriam Makeba
#18. African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.
Miriam Makeba
#19. It is very much the theme of our President, President Thabo Mbeki, whose passion is for Africa to work together, and for Africans to get up and do things for us. We are trying as women to do things for ourselves.
Miriam Makeba
#22. There are a lot of homes for boys, but very few for girls, that is why I chose to do for girls.
Miriam Makeba
#23. You are damned and praised, or encouraged or discouraged by those who listen to you, and those who come to applaud you. And to me, those people are very important.
Miriam Makeba
#24. The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us ...
Miriam Makeba
#25. For instance, we're always fighting amongst each other. Who gives us the arms? And then we become indebted to wherever we are buying them from - with what? The very resources we need to keep there.
Miriam Makeba
#26. I titled the album Reflections because I am reflecting on my music career.
Miriam Makeba
#27. I have one thing in common with the emerging black nations of Africa: We both have voices, and we are discovering what we can do with them.
Miriam Makeba
#28. People in the United States still have a 'Tarzan' movie view of Africa. That's because in the movies all you see are jungles and animals ... We [too] watch television and listen to the radio and go to dances and fall in love.
Miriam Makeba
#29. [Belafonte]'d take me to perform for Martin Luther King's cause. But when they were marching I did not take part, because I was not a citizen
Miriam Makeba
#30. Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can't do anything about that.
Miriam Makeba
#31. I do not sing politics. I merely sing the truth.
Miriam Makeba
#32. Be careful, think about the effect of what you say. Your words should be constructive, bring people together, not pull them apart.
Miriam Makeba
#33. And why is our music called world music? I think people are being polite. What they want to say is that it's third world music. Like they use to call us under developed countries, now it has changed to developing countries, it's much more polite.
Miriam Makeba
#34. It was hard to be away from home, but I am glad that I am home now.
Miriam Makeba
#35. In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.
Miriam Makeba
#36. Girls are the future mothers of our society, and it is important that we focus on their well-being.
Miriam Makeba
#37. I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising,
Miriam Makeba
#38. I see other black women imitate my style, which is no style at all, but just letting our hair be itself. They call it the Afro Look.
Miriam Makeba
#39. I look at a stream and I see myself: a native South African, flowing irresistibly over hard obstacles until they become smooth and, one day, disappear - flowing from an origin that has been forgotten toward an end that will never be.
Miriam Makeba
#40. And I believe that it becomes a troubled continent because there are those who must always cause confusion so that we do not keep these natural resources.
Miriam Makeba
#41. If given a choice, I would have certainly selected to be what I am: one of the oppressed instead of one of the oppressors.
Miriam Makeba
#42. Which goes to show you, you can make all the laws you want, but you cannot change people's ways. If you must change them, you have to understand that it will take a long time.
Miriam Makeba
#43. It's a really unfair world because life is, where I am; all day long we listen to American music. So I don't see why the radios in the U.S. cannot even put aside one hour a day just to play music that is not American.
Miriam Makeba
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