On the Shoulders of Giants Quotes

“The person unaware of history is like a rudderless boat just floating out in the middle of the ocean, hostages to the waves and currents.”
― Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance

“The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the Northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.”
― Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance

“The intellects of the Harlem Renaissance realized that before whites would see blacks as equals, first blacks had to see themselves that way- and not try to pretend to be white or adopt white ideals of beauty.”
― Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance

“The person who has some awareness of the past knows how to fashion a rudder and which direction land is.”
― Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance

“Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was "written wrong" and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor.”
― Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance