"What we need is a collective practice in which investigating and shedding privilege is seen as reclaiming connection, mending relationships broken by the system, and is framed as gain, not loss. Amílcar Cabral, leader of Guinea-Bissau's war of independence from Portuguese colonial rule, called it "class suicide," meaning to die to one's class position by irrevocably aligning oneself with the interests of the oppressed. Cuban revolutionary José Martí put it more positively and poetically in the poem that became the popular song "Guantanamera": "I want to throw in my lot with the poor of the earth. The little mountain stream pleases me more than the sea.""

"Through a marvelous law of natural compensation, he who gives of himself grows, and he who turns inward and lives from small pleasures, is afraid to share them with others, and only thinks avariciously of cultivating his appetites loses his humanity and becomes loneliness itself. He carries in his breast all the dreariness of winter. He becomes in fact and appearance an insect."

"Love is... born with the pleasure of looking at each other, it is fed with the necessity of seeing each other, it is concluded with the impossibility of separation!"

"Oh, what company good poets are!"

"A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them."

"To beautify life is to give it an object."

"Man needs to suffer. When he does not have real griefs he creates them. Griefs purify and prepare him."

"Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests."

"A nation is not a complex of wheels, nor a wild horse race, but a stride upward concerted by real men."

"Men are products, expressions, reflections; they live to the extent that they coincide with their epoch, or to the extent that they differ markedly from it."

"A grain of poetry suffices to season a century."

"Hatred, slavery's inevitable aftermath."

"Others go to bed with their mistresses; I with my ideas."

"Man needs to go outside himself in order to find repose and reveal himself."

"Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him."

"The spirit of a government must be that of the country. The form of a government must come from the makeup of the country. Government is nothing but the balance of the natural elements of a country."

"The whole afternoon was spent rejoicing as the demonstration spread across the city; no one walked alone for all San Juan was a single family."

"Many houses were still full of light when, at the close of March 22, the people of the Círculo returned to their homes, which were gladdened with a fleeting gladness by an hour of justice — for there are still many slaves, black and white, in Puerto Rico!"

"Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy."

"Yo quiero salir del mundo por la puerta natural: en un carro de hojas verdes a morir me han de llevar. No me pongan en lo oscuro a morir como un traidor: yo soy bueno, y como bueno moriré de cara al sol."

"This is the age in which hills can look down upon the mountains."

"Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro."

"I have lived in the monster and I know its insides; and my sling is the sling of David."

"Rights are to be taken, not requested; seized, not begged for."

"La patria es ara, no pedestal."

"Day and night I always dream with open eyes."

"Cuba and Belgium are both countries of modest size, surrounded by large, powerful and often hostile powers."

"The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village. Provided that he can be mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or add to the savings in his strongbox, he considers the universal order good, unaware of those giants with seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, or of the strife in the heavens between comets that go through the air asleep, gulping down worlds."

"Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones. There is no prow that can cut through a cloudbank of ideas. A powerful idea, waved before the world at the proper time, can stop a squadron of iron-clad ships, like the mystical flag of the Last judgement."

"The trees must form ranks to keep the giant with seven-league boots from passing! It is the time of mobilization, of marching together, and we must go forward in close ranks, like silver in the veins of the Andes."

"To govern well, one must see things as they are."

"Government must originate in the country. The spirit of government must be that of the country Its structure must conform to rules appropriate to the country. Good government is nothing more than the balance of the country's natural elements."

"In nations composed of both cultured and uncultured elements, the uncultured will govern because it is their habit to attack and resolve doubts with their fists in cases where the cultured have failed in the art of governing. The uncultured masses are lazy and timid in the realm of intelligence, and they want to be governed well. But if the government hurts them, they shake it off and govern themselves."