Latest Harry Belafonte Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• America can no longer afford to be as arrogant as we've been. We can no longer exempt ourselves from the global family of concern.

  Harry Belafonte

  America, Arrogant, Concern

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• We have the opportunity now to look at the two billion people in the world who suffer from the most abject poverty, hunger, disease, and devastation. Add to that another two billion people who are just plain poor. If you look into the world of those caught in economic oppression, illiteracy, disease, and sexism, then you'll understand more clearly what we have to do.

  Harry Belafonte

  Opportunity, Two, People

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• I think now, with our technology, our capacity to grow food, our ability to stop raping the Earth and destroying the ecology and killing off fellow creatures, we have a chance to bring a new harmony and a new path to human development.

  Harry Belafonte

  Thinking, Technology, Path

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• Terrorism is in many, many ways the final utterance of voices unheard.

  Harry Belafonte

  Voice, Finals, Utterance

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• Without compromise repression would be defeated. Just as some cancers feed on hormones, compromise becomes the hormone of oppression.

  Harry Belafonte

  Cancer, Would Be, Compromise

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• Not since the early days of the civil rights movement has America been given an opportunity as great as the opportunity we have now. It's one thing for us to avenge our pain, our anger, and our rage by targeting bin Laden and a handful of men who have wrought this villainy. But one should be wise enough to ask, What fueled all this? What continues to sustain the possibility that this will not go away? I think the answer is poverty.

  Harry Belafonte

  Wise, Pain, Men

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• As a matter of fact, compromise is what oppression feeds on.

  Harry Belafonte

  Matter, Facts, Compromise

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• Wherever I found resistance to oppression, whether in Africa, in Latin America, certainly here in America in the South, I joined that resistance. I took part in the labor movement, in social movements, in the church community. I felt that it was the honorable thing to do and still do.

  Harry Belafonte

  Latin, America, Community

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• Do not submit. It is extremely critical that repression be met full head-on and that it be resisted with every fiber in our being. There is just absolutely no compromise that can be made with it.

  Harry Belafonte

  Fiber, Compromise, Being There

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• I became an anti-fascist, and the more I saw what was happening to the peoples of Europe, the Jews, the more I saw the deep cruelty and inhumanity of that system and its philosophy of white supremacy.

  Harry Belafonte

  Philosophy, Europe, White

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• In my earliest of years, my mother was a huge force in my life. She was for all intents and purposes, a single parent. My father had abandoned us. He was an alcoholic and a physical abuser. My mother lived through that tyranny and made her living as a domestic worker. She was uneducated but she brought high principles and decent values into our existence, and she set lofty goals for herself and for her children. We were forever inspired by her strength and by her resistance to racism and to fascism.

  Harry Belafonte

  Mother, Children, Father

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• Although we had a lot of villainy here in America, Adolf Hitler was certainly the most visible illustration of what would happen if fascism went unchallenged.

  Harry Belafonte

  Illustration, America, Fascism

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• From the point of view of the poor, the hungry, the disenfranchised, the wretched of the Earth... there will never be peace until their condition has been alleviated and until their humanity is in full bloom.

  Harry Belafonte

  Views, Humanity, Earth

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• The human spirit is resilient and truth - no matter how long you abuse it and how long you try to crush it - will, as Dr. King would say, rise up again, and in the final analysis will prevail.

  Harry Belafonte

  Crush, Kings, Long

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• I don't know what America has really learned. We are too quick to do what's expedient on behalf of our culture of greed and hedonism. We're quite prepared to go to conditions of tyranny in order to sustain that culture, and we do it in the name of democracy, when nothing could be more undemocratic. We do it in the name of saving the values of our society, when the way we behave corrupts those values. We do it in the name of God in whom we believe, when in fact we have corrupted our own vision of the Christian journey.

  Harry Belafonte

  Christian, Believe, Journey

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• I think there's a lot that the larger society could have been taught or can be taught, but I'm not sure - given how unyielding the larger society has been - that much has been learned.

  Harry Belafonte

  Thinking, Unyielding, Taught

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• Each time we arrive at a new level in extricating ourselves from economic, social, spiritual domination, we have a moment when we dance in the world of these new experiences, only to find that the music soon stops, the dance ends, and we're struggling once again to save ourselves from being thrown back into those conditions.

  Harry Belafonte

  Spiritual, Struggle, New Experiences

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• Pop culture has none of the vibrancy that you find in the folk culture, where people speak directly to their own experience in the human condition.

  Harry Belafonte

  People, Culture, Vibrancy

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• I realized that most white Americans knew very little about our history and our struggle, and were having difficulty understanding the basis for our agitation and our resistance and our complaints. I also discovered that while black Americans had a sense of the beauty and tragedy of the journey from the time of slavery until now, we were not rooted in the specifics. I thought one way to familiarize people with that history would be through the voices of the great folk artists.

  Harry Belafonte

  Struggle, Artist, Journey

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• I delighted in the music of Africa, the earliest of the slave plantation songs, the transformation into Christianity and all that Christianity brought to the lives of the Africans who were forced to come to America.

  Harry Belafonte

  Song, America, Transformation

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

• I think being born in America and growing up exclusively within the American boundaries of race and race oppression is a very different experience for those of us who grew up under the boundaries of race and race experience in the Caribbean or for those who grew up in Africa.

  Harry Belafonte

  Growing Up, Thinking, America

  "Harry Belafonte Birthday Tribute". The Tavis Smiley Show, www.pbs.org. February 28, 2017.

• I think America offers a dream that cannot be fulfilled as easily anywhere else in the world as it could be fulfilled here. Although oppression was common to all of us, those styles of oppression gave us the opportunity to see the world in dimensions we didn't quite see growing up in any one place.

  Harry Belafonte

  Dream, Growing Up, Opportunity

  "Harry Belafonte Birthday Tribute". "The Tavis Smiley Show" with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org. February 28, 2017.

• I come from a sense of struggle, a sense of using the instruments that were given to me to manipulate the environment in which I found myself, and joined up with those who are equally as skillful at manipulating that environment, as was I.

  Harry Belafonte

  Struggle, Environment, Given

  "Harry Belafonte Birthday Tribute". "The Tavis Smiley Show" with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org. February 28, 2017.

• I am who I am despite what America has put before me. I am who I am despite the obstacles that we have all faced based upon race and based upon social and spiritual humiliation.

  Harry Belafonte

  Spiritual, Who I Am, America

  "Actor-activist Harry Belafonte, Part 1". "The Tavis Smiley Show" with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org. November 30, 2011.

• My formative years, until I was 12, was all shaped by Jamaican culture, by that economy, by the people in my family, who are agriculturalists, who were plantation workers, who harvested those crops and took them down to the boats run by the United Food Company, to load those ships at night, hence all the songs that I sing that come from that environment.

  Harry Belafonte

  Running, Song, Night

  Source: www.pbs.org