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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

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Although We Had A

Harry Belafonte

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I Not Only Think That They (u.s. Leaders) Are Misguided, But I Think They Know Exactly What They Are Doing And I Think That They Are Men Who Are Possessed Of Evil.

In Poor Environment, I Find Great Inspiration. Many Of The Men And Women Whom I Admire As Artists, The Things They Write, The Songs They Sing, The Admission Is Filled With Inspired Moments To Overcome Oppression.

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.

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.

John Say's It's James Who Started First, James Tells The Story In Reverse. I Drag My Belt From Off Me Waist, You Should Have Heard Dem Screaming Round De Place.

Our Foreign Policy Has Made A Wreck Of This Planet. I'm Always In Africa... And When I Go To These Places I See American Policy Written On The Walls Of Oppression Everywhere.

Through Electing Officials That Will Protect The Constitution And Commit Themselves To The Rights Of The People And The Health Of The Nation, We Will Be Able To Ensure That No Group Of Ideologues And No Private Sector Institution Can Coopt Our Rights, Take Us Into Senseless Wars And Steal The Nation From Its People.

You Can Cage The Singer But Not The Song.

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.

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.

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I Grew Up In A School System . . . Where Nobody Understood The Meaning Of Learning Disorder. In The West Indies, I Was Constantly Being Physically Abused Because The Whipping Of Students Was Permitted.

No Matter What The Greatest Tyrant In The World, The Greatest Terrorist In The World, George W. Bush Says, We're Here To Tell You: Not Hundreds, Not Thousands, But Millions Of The American People ... Support Your Revolution.

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.

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.

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We [americans] Move About The World Arrogantly, Calling Wars When We Want, Overthrowing Governments When We Want. There Is A Price To Be Paid For It -- Look At 9/11. [that] Wasn't Just Bin Laden. Bin Laden Didn't Come From The Abstract. He Came From Somewhere, And If You Look Where ... You'll See America's Hand Of Villainy.

Bin Laden Didn't Come From The Abstract. He Came From Somewhere, And If You Look Where ... You'll See America's Hand Of Villainy.

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Art In Its Highest Form Is Art That Serves And Instructs Society And Human Development.

Fascism Is Fascism. Terrorism Is Terrorism. Oppression Is Oppression.

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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.

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I Am A Man Who Perceives Life In A Certain Way, A Man Who Rejects Things That Defecate On Humankind, Who Rejects Anything That Will Not Give People Room For Dissent.

Colin Powell's Committed To Come Into The House Of The Master. When Colin Powell Dares To Suggest Something Other Than What The Master Wants To Hear, He Will Be Turned Back Out To Pasture.

Turning Against The Church I Also Had To Turn Against A Lot Of The Teachings Of People In My Family Who Were Very Much Of The Church And Caught In It, And Every Time I Turned To Find Where Resides The Good In The Church, All I Saw Was The Demonic, The Lucifer Of The Journey.

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African American

The Usa Has More People In Prison That Any Other Country, Including Countries With Much Larger Populations. 13% Of The Population Is Black But 80% Of The People In Prison Are Black, Mostly For Soft Crimes.

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.

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Why Are We Mute? Where Are Our Leaders, Our Legislators? Where Is The Church?

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I Don't Think That (u.s. President) George Bush...is A Man Of Honor.

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Without Compromise Repression Would Be Defeated. Just As Some Cancers Feed On Hormones, Compromise Becomes The Hormone Of Oppression.

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.

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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.

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.

New Experiences

Each And Every One Of You Has The Power, The Will And The Capacity To Make A Difference In The World In Which You Live In

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.

More Than Once My Mother Would Point Out: "harry Belafonte Is The Best-looking Man On The Planet."

I Like Colin Powell, I Like His West Indian Background, I Like His Intellect, I Like A Lot Of Things That He Does And His Style. What Is At Fault Here Is A Policy That's Taking This Country To Hell.

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