Top 50 John Henrik Clarke Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I only debate my equals. All others I teach.”

— John Henrik Clarke

2. “To control a people you must first control what they think about themselves and how they regard their history and culture. And when your conqueror makes you ashamed of your culture and your history, he needs no prison walls and no chains to hold you.”

— John Henrik Clarke

3. “Every form of true education trains the student in self-reliance.”

— John Henrik Clarke

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

— John Henrik Clarke

5. “Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.”

— John Henrik Clarke

6. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

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

— John Henrik Clarke

8. “Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds.”

— John Henrik Clarke

9. “A people’s relationship to their heritage is the same as the relationship of a child to its mother.”

— John Henrik Clarke

10. “Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European’s control over the world.”

— John Henrik Clarke

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

— John Henrik Clarke

12. “Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as ‘Western Civilization,’ long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.”

— John Henrik Clarke

13. “Whoever is in control of the hell in your life, is your devil.”

— John Henrik Clarke

14. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

15. “To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.”

— John Henrik Clarke

16. “We will have taken one giant step forward when we face this reality: Powerful people never teach powerless people how to take their power away from them.”

— John Henrik Clarke

17. “Every single thing that touches your life, religious, socially and politically, must be an instrument of your liberation or you must throw it into the ashcan of history.”

— John Henrik Clarke

18. “We have been educated into believing someone else’s concept of the deity, and someone else’s standard of beauty. You have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best suits your freedom, your dignity, and your understanding. And once you do that, you don’t apologize.”

— John Henrik Clarke

19. “The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.”

— John Henrik Clarke

20. “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.’”

— John Henrik Clarke

21. “Most human behavior is controlled by images. Image is a factor in how people look at themselves and what they use to reflect themselves. The control of images is a major factor in world power.”

— John Henrik Clarke

22. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

23. “If I lead the field in any way, it is in the area of curricula development, study guides and other teaching materials.”

— John Henrik Clarke

24. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

25. “To be black and beautiful means nothing in this world unless we are black and powerful.”

— John Henrik Clarke

26. “White people think when you love yourself you hate them. No, when I love myself they become irrelevant to me.”

— John Henrik Clarke

27. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

28. “I want to make it clear that the black race did not come to the United States culturally empty-handed. The role and importance of ethnic history is in how well it teaches a people to use their own talents, take pride in their own history and love their own memories.”

— John Henrik Clarke

29. “The first light of human consciousness and the world’s first civilizations were in Africa.”

— John Henrik Clarke

30. “My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.”

— John Henrik Clarke

31. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

32. “African people need to stop shouting ‘nationtime’ until they are clear about the responsibilities of running a nation.”

— John Henrik Clarke

33. “When the early Europeans first met Africans, at the crossroads of history, it was a respectful meeting and the Africans were not slaves. Their nations were old before Europe was born.”

— John Henrik Clarke

34. “It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances.”

— John Henrik Clarke

35. “My loving sister Mary has always shared the pain and pleasure of my heartbeat in a unique and special way. We have sung our sad and warm songs together.”

— John Henrik Clarke

36. “What I have learned is that a whole lot of people with degrees don’t know a damn thing, and a lot of people with no degrees are brilliant.”

— John Henrik Clarke

37. “Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.”

— John Henrik Clarke

38. “There was a time when all dark-skinned people were called Ethiopians, for the Greeks referred to Africa as, ‘The Land Of The Burnt-Face People.’”

— John Henrik Clarke

39. “Malcolm X found the language that communicated across the board, from college professor to floor sweeper, all at the same time, without demeaning the intellect of either.”

— John Henrik Clarke

40. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

41. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

42. “When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with ‘Georgia on My Mind.’”

— John Henrik Clarke

43. “I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.”

— John Henrik Clarke

44. “My daddy wanted me to be a farmer; feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit.”

— John Henrik Clarke

45. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

46. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

47. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke

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

— John Henrik Clarke

49. “There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action.”

— John Henrik Clarke

50. “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.”

— John Henrik Clarke