Maya Angelou

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!

The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve.

All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and bad.

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

Suspicions that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; but suspicions that are artificially nourished and put into men’s heads by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.

To hazard much to get much has more of avarice than wisdom.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

If thou art clean and warm, it is sufficient; for more doth but rob the Poor, and please the Wanton.

He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father, will be the most daring in deceiving others.

In charity there is no excess.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.