Top 80 June Jordan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?”

— June Jordan

52. “Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis: open, relentless, and on time! She is as radiant, she is as true, as that invincible sunrise she means means means to advance With all of the faith and all of the grace of her entirely devoted life.”

— June Jordan

53. “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

54. “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

55. “The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what’s given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.”

— June Jordan

56. “Something has to be done about the way in which this world is set up.”

— June Jordan

57. “If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable.”

— June Jordan

58. “The United States Supreme Court, once a reliable if ultimate recourse for progressive and even revolutionary grievances, has become a retrograde wellspring for enormous economic and social distress.”

— June Jordan

59. “Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?”

— June Jordan

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

— June Jordan

61. “In the context of tragedy, all polite behavior is self-denial.”

— June Jordan

62. “Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie.”

— June Jordan

63. “Who the hell set things up like this?”

— June Jordan

64. “As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.”

— June Jordan

65. “Sometimes we become so sophisticated we have to read the New York Times in order to figure out whether it’s a hot or a rainy day.”

— June Jordan

66. “The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.”

— June Jordan

67. “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

68. “If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here.”

— June Jordan

69. “The courts cannot garnish a fathers 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

70. “As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.”

— June Jordan

71. “To tell the truth is to become beautiful.”

— June Jordan

72. “I think I have come to a place where I’m able to feel more comfortable about being honest.”

— June Jordan

73. “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

74. “If any of us hopes to survive, she must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.”

— June Jordan

75. “Buddy and Angela keep track of daytime just by figuring out the last and next time they will come together and how long alone. They become the heated habit of each other.”

— June Jordan

76. “The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity – the incredibly outgoing energy – of righteous rage.”

— June Jordan

77. “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

78. “When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives.”

— June Jordan

79. “I try to use words, whether in prose or poetry, that people can understand, that make them feel in an intense way. I’m a writer, that’s what I do.”

— June Jordan

80. “We had to break those laws or agree to the slaveholder’s image of us: three fifths of a human being.”

— June Jordan

81. “I could no longer participate in an exchange requiring acrobatics of self-denial.”

— June Jordan

82. “The expression of hatred for your enemies is sometimes the only way to end self-hatred.”

— June Jordan

83. “The whole world will become a home to all of us, or none of us can hope to live on it, peacefully. But much of the American dream mistakenly supposes that, like a tree, we will grow and flourish, standing in one place where we murmur doomed declarations about our roots, about finding our roots, or putting down roots. In fact, of course, if we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.”

— June Jordan

84. “Our runaways may well be the backbone courageous among our kids: the ones who will risk hunger and forced prostitution and jail and death, in order to say NO to this overwhelming suffocation and victimizing, adult defeat into which they have been trapped, by dint of being born.”

— June Jordan