Top 80 June Jordan Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

— June Jordan

2. “Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.”

— June Jordan

3. “I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me.”

— June Jordan

4. “I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name.”

— June Jordan

5. “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

6. “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

7. “And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

— June Jordan

8. “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

9. “I am working never to be late again.”

— June Jordan

10. “I am the history of the rejection of who I am.”

— June Jordan

11. “To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.”

— June Jordan

12. “Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”

— June Jordan

13. “Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires...”

— June Jordan

14. “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 Arabic.”

— June Jordan

15. “As I think about anyone or anything – whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film – as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?”

— June Jordan

16. “Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few.”

— June Jordan

17. “We survive our love because we go on loving.”

— June Jordan

18. “To believe is to become what you believe.”

— June Jordan

19. “In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”

— June Jordan

20. “To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.”

— June Jordan

21. “Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we’re not running hard enough, not really trying.”

— June Jordan

22. “I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.”

— June Jordan

23. “That a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.”

— June Jordan

24. “So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.”

— June Jordan

25. “A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.”

— June Jordan

Featured in: Strong Quotes

26. “Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.”

— June Jordan

27. “Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.”

— June Jordan

28. “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

29. “The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.”

— June Jordan

30. “As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth – whatever the truth may be – that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”

— June Jordan

31. “Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.”

— June Jordan

32. “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

33. “My heart is not peripheral to me.”

— June Jordan

34. “What’s important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That’s what it means.”

— June Jordan

35. “I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.”

— June Jordan

36. “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

37. “And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.”

— June Jordan

38. “Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good...”

— June Jordan

39. “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

40. “This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.”

— June Jordan

41. “If we even tolerate any oppression of gay and lesbian Americans, if we join those who would intrude upon the choices of our hearts, then who among us shall be free?”

— June Jordan

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

— June Jordan

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

— June Jordan

44. “We must make language accountable to the truths of our experience.”

— June Jordan

45. “As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.”

— June Jordan

46. “I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.”

— June Jordan

47. “Reproductive choice is not some trendy item to toss or keep around the house. If you cannot get an education or a job, if you cannot choose what will or will not happen with your own body, then what freedom do you have?”

— June Jordan

48. “What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?”

— June Jordan

49. “This is the meaning of poverty: when you have nothing better to do than to hate somebody who, just exactly like yourself, has nothing better to do than to pick on you instead of trying to figure out how come there’s nothing better to do.”

— June Jordan

50. “Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?”

— June Jordan