Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

What other creature in the world besides the Black woman has had to build the knowledge of so much hatred into her survival and keep going?

Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses;

There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

Can any one of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual?

Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people?

We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable.

It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating

She is measuring the self she does not fully want to be.

And self-empowerment is the most deeply political work there is, and the most difficult.