Top 25 Nina Simone Quotes

I try to swim every damn day I can, and I’ve learned to scuba dive and snorkel.

Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.

I flirt all the time. I like men! I don’t think we can do without them.

I’m a real rebel with a cause.

All the time, there was the weight of my community’s expectations on my shoulders.

I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don’t think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.

The protest years were over, not just for me but for a whole generation, and in music, just like in politics, many of the greatest talents were dead or in exile, and their place was filled by third-rate imitators.

When I was studying… there weren’t any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.

I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.

There’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.

From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.

Greed has driven the world crazy. And I think I’m lucky that I have a place over here that I can call home.

I don’t like rap music at all. I don’t think it’s music. It’s just a beat and rapping.

I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.

You feel the shame, humiliation, and anger at being just another victim of prejudice, and at the same time, there’s the nagging worry that maybe… you’re just no good.

What I was interested in was conveying an emotional message, which means using everything you’ve got inside you sometimes to barely make a note, or if you have to strain to sing, you sing.

I want to shake people up so bad, that when they leave a nightclub where I’ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces.

My daughter is in more competition with me. I never wanted to be bigger than my mother or to challenge her.

I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: ‘You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.

I’m not a blues singer, I’m a diva.

This may be a dream, but I’ll say it anyway: I was supposed to be married last year, and I bought a gown. When I meet Nelson Mandela, I shall put on this gown and have the train of it removed and put aside, and kiss the ground that he walks on and then kiss his feet.

To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world. Black people. And I mean that in every sense.

I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I’m not going.

I didn’t get interested in music. It was a gift from God.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that’s not what I play. I play black classical music.