Quotes by Harry Belafonte

“You can cage the singer but not the song.”

“We Have Got To Bring Corporate America To Its Knees.”

“I dont think that (U.S. President) George Bush...is a man of honor.”

“I think that they [Bush Administration] are men who are possessed of evil.”

“I think Bush has a very selfish, arrogant point of view. I think he is interested in power, I think he believes his truth is the only truth, and that he will do what he wants to do despite the people.”

“When I was forty and looking at sixty, it seemed like a thousand miles away. But sixty-two feels like a week and a half away from eighty. I must now get on with those things I always talked about doing but put off.”

“Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet, ... Im always in Africa . . . And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.”

“I was quite taken with her, because Id never seen the African influence in dance with that kind of strength and artistic power. It impacted my soul. No one had reached those heights. She was the definitive black dance company. She moved among the highest intellectuals of black culture, all the writers and painters and literary folk.”

“Weve watched her be abused in the past, and shes overcome, stood strong. Were not going to be absent or indifferent to the fact that she may be abused again.”

“Im not familiar with all of what the case is about, so I cant speak to that.”

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.

After all, Paul Robeson said, ‘Artists are the radical voice of civilization.’ Each and every one of you in this room, with your gifts and your power and your skills, could perhaps change the way in which our global humanity mistrusts itself. Perhaps we as artists and as visionaries, for what’s better in the human heart and the human soul, could influence citizens everywhere in the world to see the better side of who and what we are as a species.