Quotes by June Jordan

About June Jordan:

June Millicent Jordan was a Caribbean-American poet and activist.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

and if i if i ever let love go because the hatred and the whisperings become a phantom dictate i o- bey in lieu of impulse and realities (the blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees) then let love freeze me out. (from i must become a menace to m...

June Jordan

That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.

June Jordan

But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.

June Jordan

Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?

June Jordan

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

June Jordan

The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.

June Jordan

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

June Jordan

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

June Jordan

One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!

June Jordan

My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

June Jordan

My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair.

June Jordan

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

June Jordan

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

June Jordan

I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

June Jordan

CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.

June Jordan

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

June Jordan

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

June Jordan

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into ...

June Jordan

In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

June Jordan

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

June Jordan

Author Bio

  • NameJune Jordan
  • DescriptionWriter
  • BornJuly 9, 1936
  • DiedJune 14, 2002
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet
  • AwardsLambda Literary Award