Best 115 quotes of John Henrik Clarke on MyQuotes

Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.

African people need to stop shouting 'nationtime' until they are clear about the responsibilities of running a nation.

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the United States would enter, in a formal way, what had been up to that date strictly a European conflict. Marcus Garvey's prophecy about the European scramble to maintain dominance over the whole world was now a reality.

After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south. They destroyed the great independent states in West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western slave trade and the Arabs were in the slave trade before Islam and they are still in the slave trade.

A good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold his audience's attention, then he can teach his lesson.

All life is a test one way or the other.

All the working-class people could feel a Malcolm X. They could hear Malcolm X, and two weeks later they could whisper back what he said. Verbatim. They could remember the way he put it, and he put it so well.

Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'

Anytime you turn on your own concept of God, you are no longer a free man. No one needs to put chains on your body, because the chains are on your mind.

As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.

Attending church is one thing, belonging is another.

Each generation must assume the responsibility of securing their manhood, their womanhood, the definition of their being on earth that in the final analysis is nationhood.

Eat bread. You don't know if it's been polluted. Drink water, you don't know whether it's been polluted. So living is a test.

...education has but one honorable purpose, one alone, everything else is a waste of time......that is to train the student to be a proper handler of power.

Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.

Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they colonized information about the world.

Every form of true education trains the student in self-reliance

Everything that touches YOUR life, must be an instrument of YOUR liberation or tossed into the trash cans of HISTORY

History is a compass that you locate yourself on the map of human geography, politically, culturally, financially.

History is like a clock, it tells you your time of day.

History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are but, more importantly, what they must be.

I am a nationalist, and a Pan-Africanist, first and foremost. I was well grounded in history before ever taking a history course. I did not spend much formal time in school - I had to work.

I attended a Baptist church as a child and was an avid reader starting with the Bible.

I believe in doing good for good's sake.

I believe in spirituality, which is out there.

I could pull all kinds of games on my mother. I couldn't pull any games on my father.

I don't attend any particular church now. I don't believe in denominations, nor do I believe in organized religion.

If God is love, then God has no stepchildren to love.

If the Africans and Arabs were ruling Spain from 711 to 1492, had they destroyed the Catholic church, they still would be ruling Spain to this day because that's the institution that held them together. The institute that gave them the only hope was their church. This is why we are so depressed because the institutions of hope that would cause fulfillment amongst us has either been destroyed or laughed at.

If we are going to be masters of our destiny, we must be masters of the ideas that influence that destiny.

If we don't unite, chances are we will go back into slavery.

If you expect the present day school system to give history to you, you are dreaming. This, we have to do ourselves. The Chinese didn't go out in the world and beg people to teach Chinese studies or let them teach Chinese studies. The Japanese didn't do that either. People don't beg other people to restore their history; they do it themselves.

I have gone up in the Pyramids and the stones are so close together you can't force a playing card between them and (they are) in perfect alignment. So those people must have had some hydraulics or something. You take 20 men, put them around a big stone, their legs would get in the way. Even if they could lift it, 20 pairs of legs hitting against each other would throw it off balance. And they would not have it in exact alignment. Not even a fraction of an inch off.

I have no faith in much organized religion because I think it's by a bunch of hypocrites and practiced by a bunch of hypocrites. They don't mean what they say because all of them are in the slave trade one way or the other.

I have walked majestically with kings and queens and presidents and other heads of states.

I make a special point of working on Thanksgiving Day. I have friends I go out with but I even make it plain to them. The standard reason for Thanksgiving doesn't mean nothing to me.

I'm one of the people who believes that our losses were greater than our gains. Because before the Civil Rights movement we had entrepreneurship in the black community. Right now, in Harlem, if I wanted to get a shoe repaired, I would have a hard time finding a black shoe repairman. On near about every third corner, you could find a decent black barber, decent black laundry, had restaurants in the neighborhood that were open 24 hours. The food was good at 3 o'clock in the morning as at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

In order to have a charismatic leader, you have to have a charismatic program. Because if you have a charismatic program, then if you can read you can lead. When the leader gets killed while you're reading from page 13 of your charismatic program, you can bury the man with honors, then continue the plan by reading from page 14. Let's keep on.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.

I question the political judgement of those who would have the nerve to paint Christ white with his obvious African nose, lips and wooly hair.

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.

I say if black people don't unite and begin to support themselves, their communities and their families, they might as well begin to go out of business as a people. Nobody's going to have any mercy. And nobody's going to have any compunction about making slaves out of them.

I think that Jesus-dependency has taken over our minds, and too many of our institutions.

I think that you're just as close to Jesus if you use the equipment he gave you other than to call on him to do for you what you can do for yourself.

It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine that they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances of a given case, and the surest check, often the only check, on such perjury, is to recognize the impossibility that men of larger instruction and resources and experience could have been guilty of such conduct.

It is too often forgotten that when the Europeans gained enough maritime skills and gunpowder to conquer most of the world, they not only colonized the bulk of the world's people but they colonized the interpretation of history itself. Human history was rewritten to favor them at the expense of other people. The roots of modern racism can be traced to this conquest and colonization.

It is unfortunate that so much of the history of Africa has been written by conquerors, foreigners, missionaries and adventurers. The Egyptians left the best record of their history written by local writers.

It's time for Black people to stop playing the separating game of geography, of where the slave ship put us down. We must concentrate on where the slave ship picked us up.