""Hands up! Don't shoot!" and "I can’t breathe!" became mantras of the growing movement to stem police violence, and the systemic racism at the core of the problem. The phrases began appearing in popular culture, showing the speed and depth with which the movement was growing. Professional athletes in the United States are followed closely by millions of fans. So, when basketball superstar LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers warmed up before a game wearing a T-shirt emblazoned "I Can't Breathe," people noticed."

"LA Lakers star LeBron James paid tribute to Chadwick Boseman before the Lakers playoff game against the Portland Trailblazers by taking a knee during the National Anthem and crossing his arms across his chest to give the Wakanda Forever salute."

"Growing up as a black kid, you had superheroes that you looked up to, but they weren’t black. You had Batman, you had Superman, you had Spider Man, and so on and so on. And for Ryan Coogler and for that cast, and for him himself to be able to make Black Panther...it actually felt real. It actually felt like we finally had our Black superhero and nobody can touch us."

"I have so many words to praise Kyrie that I end up with absolutely none because it's just. It's so. He's the most gifted player the NBA has ever seen. He has the best gifts I've ever seen of any NBA player."

"To see [Bronny James] handle it, you know, with such class and so, you know, just, like, self awareness and just staying even killed is just a remarkable thing, man, and super proud of him."

"We are already limited in the sense that given that type of power, that type of stage that he had, and especially in that industry. You don’t see many black male and female actors being able to put on that stage. For him to be as transcendent as he was. But then you add on the fact that growing up as a black kid, you had superheroes that you looked up to, but they weren’t black. You had Batman, you had Superman, you had Spider Man, and so on and so on. And for him"

"CLEVELAND! This is for you!"

"No matter how much money you have, no matter how famous you are, no matter how many people admire you, being black in America is tough."

"All the people that were rooting for me to fail… at the end of the day, tomorrow they have to wake up and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. … They got the same personal problems they had today. And I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things I want to do."

"Crazy. I just wanted to suck him off and everyone's mad. God sees everything!"

"Not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven."

"This fall, and this was a very tough decision for me, but this fall I will be taking my talents to South Beach and play with the Miami Heat."

"It’s hard for me to congratulate somebody after you just lose to them. … I’m a winner. It’s not being a poor sport or anything like that. If somebody beats you up, you’re not going to congratulate them. That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m a competitor. That’s what I do. It doesn’t make sense for me to go over and shake somebody’s hand."

"He really is one of a kind. That kid is special and will be the next big thing, I promise you that. The way he moves and his athleticism reminds me a lot about myself."

"I believe my poetry reflects an intense relationship to the music of the spoken word. Writing plays involves not only language, but the interplay of various languages-different characters' varying speech patterns and inflections, personalities-as well as the visible rhythms of bodies relating to each other. A domestic scene in a play is like a string quartet."

"I discovered that poetry and drama have more in common than Aristotle, with his "classic dramatic unities," may have cared to admit. Alfred Hitchcock once said that drama was "life the with the dull bits cut out," and Gwendolyn Brooks defines poetry as "life distilled"-where's the big difference? For if a poet planes away unnecessary matter so that we can see clearly to the very core of the soul, a playwright commits the same sacred enterprise by training her spotlight on some select souls and then summoning the audience to listen, to bear witness in the dark."

"There are poets I return to again and again for sustenance: I read them, shake my head and wonder, How did they do that? I go back to figures like Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy, for example, and Langston Hughes and Shakespeare, and some prose writers as well - James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin."

"The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world."

"I am Rita Dove, the beautiful dove. See my black neck, see my speck. My ass is not so much cracked but i want to get out now. The poet, am I. Am me."

"You shouldn't hear the guitar by itself. It should be part of the drums so it sounds like the drummer is playing chords -- like the snare is in A or the hi-hat in D minor. You only notice the guitar when it's not there."

"Close-out games are actually kind of easy. Teams tend to fold if you come out and play hard in the beginning, so we want to come out and establish an early lead and protect it."

"When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among people, To make music in the heart."

"Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes And the heart consumes itself as if it would live, Where children age before their time And life wears down the edges of the mind, Where the old man sits with mind grown cold, While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death, Where fear companions each day's life, And Perfect Love seems long delayed. CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN: In you, in me, in all mankind."

"Community cannot feed for long on itself; it can only flourish where always the boundaries are giving way to the coming of others from beyond them — unknown and undiscovered brothers."

"There were long stretches where each of us was engaged in a private world of rapidly shifting vignettes. Always I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of human beings ebbing and flowing like the tides of the sea."

"In the conflicts between man and man, between group and group, between nation and nation, the loneliness of the seeker for community is sometimes unendurable. The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste. Always he must know that the contradictions of life are not final or ultimate; he must distinguish between failure and a many-sided awareness so that he will not mistake conformity for harmony, uniformity for synthesis. He will know that for all men to be alike is the death of life in man, and yet perceive harmony that transcends all diversities and in which diversity finds its richness and significance."

"Prayer is a form of communication between God and man and man and God….I am always impressed by the fact that it is recorded that the only thing that the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to do was to pray.""

"Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, and death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial."

"The movement of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men and women often calls them to act against the spirit of their times or causes them to anticipate a spirit which is yet in the making. In a moment of dedication they are given wisdom and courage to dare a deed that challenges and to kindle a hope that inspires."

"Howard Thurman, a great African American theologian, once wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”"

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

"The measure of a man's estimate of your strength is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place."

"Pets are family and they should be treated as such. I think the most important thing people should know [is to treat] your dog how you’d like to be treated. Your dog is going to love you as much as you love [him or her]."

"It's five O'Clock in the morning and I want ya and ya want me, Don't ya?"

"I could put you in a log cabin, in Wiskansin"

"I could put you in a condo, all the way up in Toronto"

"The boy had to pay the piper, so they all stay in fear of the neighborhood sniper"

"Perched up high on a rooftop, like a bird I'm having evil thoughts, A black hood covers my face as death flows through my mind at its own pace."

"Cause the boyz in da hood are always hard, Keep fuckin with us and we'll pull yo' card knowin nothin in life but to be legit don't quote me boy cause I said shit."

"Cruisin' down the street in my six-fo' jockin' da bitches slappin da hoes."

"When you think about a better tomorrow, you think about veganism in the world. I don’t need a dead animal or dead piece of flesh to go into my live body. There’s nothing on this planet that doesn’t want to live. I had animals as friends, they were happy to see me in their own animal way. I’m quite sure they did not want to be on my plate. I think hip-hop has become more conscious about diet… You are what you eat, so if this cow who is stressed, dumbfounded, sick becomes your meal, when you eat it, you are eating that stress and sickness. You are eating that fear. My peers and people that are related to me appreciate the vegan lifestyle, it’s really spreading."

"I tell you one thing I did used to like: the fish and chips. But I stopped eating fish this year. One day I just felt the death in it."

"See driving is like stabbing someone, it's very personal. While flying is like shooting someone, it's more distant."

"The bitch been good to me"

"You Gon' go crazy nigga tryin to count my money"

"I don't wanna do this no mo', but this the only thing that I know."

"I'm a young hot street flame they call me Sweet James or call me Sir Jones"

"Niggas who've tried, I bust they sides"

"My Mama would never have to work another day of her life."