Miriam Makeba Quotes

African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.

I look at an ant and see myself: a native South African, endowed with a strength much greater than my size, so I might cope with the weight of racism that crushes my spirit.

I was born in a poor country. I was poor, but I lived all my life with what I had. I didn’t spend more than I had. Cape Verde is not the only place where there are poor people

If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilized discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.

...entrepreneurship, resulting in large-scale job creation, was the only viable mechanism for eradicating poverty in societies.

It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.

It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. Any existing distinction between the wise and the stupid, between the rich and the poor, comes down to a matter of education.

It's a tragedy that a lot of people know more about Shakespeare than about Cao Xueqin.

Richard II by William Shakespeare

In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land.

Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends—the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.

Poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labor and exploitation of children … It’s a triangular relationship between child labor, poverty and illiteracy, and I have been trying to fight all of these things together.

But African languages refused to die. They would not simply go to the way of Latin to become the fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify, and argue about the international conferences.

Far from having become 1900 years ago a stagnant or dried-up religion, as Christian theology declares, Judaism has ever remained "a river of God full of living waters," which, while running within the river-bed of a single nation, has continued to feed anew the great streams of human civilization.

The European view point of exploitation of women in Europe compared to the African American women shows an inaccurate judgment.

Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden.