Top 30 Afeni Shakur Quotes

The worst thing that can happen to you is if you don’t take responsibility for what you did wrong.

I’m not a filmmaker. I’m not a music producer by choice.

We must recognize that anger only agitates and incites. It cannot squelch or satisfy the hunger for justice.

That’s what art is for me. It helps you maintain hope by giving you the ability to either create outside your reality, or to describe your reality.

I know that my son was an honest person and an honest artist, and what he gave from himself through his art was the depth of his humanity.

Pac was special. He was articulate. I trained him. Punishment for him was reading The New York Times.

That’s what Tupac and I got from my dad – the rebellion and the need to fight back and be recognized for being different.

Nelson Mandela’s contribution to the people of South Africa has been immeasurable and I look forward to helping with his work all over the country.

That’s what people are who have that impact on us. They are ahead of their time. They can’t help it. They get put into a small, frail body, and they are given a light that is much too bright for that cavity.

We need to read history from the source.

I wasn’t available to do the right things for my son. If not for the arts, my child would’ve been lost.

I miss my son every day a little bit more, but I thank God every day for every second that he was here.

I have no secrets. Neither did Tupac, neither does my daughter. We don’t live behind secrets, we don’t live lies, we are who we are, and we are pretty happy to be who we are.

I have never one day been ashamed of my son. Even when he was not right, that’s ok.

When I carried Tupac, when I was five months pregnant they put me back in jail, my bail was revoked. When my bail was revoked, I was not allowed to have my own food. I could only have what was there.

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement was about getting to know your culture, your history. I know all about my history.

Even after his death, Tupac is as powerful as he was when he was living.

Please remember that my great grandmother was a slave. My grandmother was a sharecropper. My mother was a factory worker.

I read every agreement of every contract. Anything I put my signature on, I really do read them. And I find things.

I just need to do Pac’s work. I just need to. Maybe because I’m a recovering addict, I’m obsessed like that.

People can like him or not like him individually. But I need for them to know that he was a person of substance, and he was worthy, and he was a good son and a good brother and a good participant in the community.

Arts can save children, no matter what’s going on in their homes.

For me, revolution is around young people with no skills, college education, and coming from everywhere having an economic impact on an entire system which no one notices.

I think people have gotten to know Tupac much better since he’s been gone than they did when he was here.

First of all, a lot of people, a lot of women and men, have lost their children. I’m not the only one. But I happen to be blessed that my son gave me all these things to work with so that I get to work out my grief in a way that other people are not able to. So I can’t possibly be downtrodden about that.

I’m grateful my son was – as any mother would say, I had a very good son.

I learned that I can’t save the world, but I can help a child at a time.

I have respect for my son because he had sense enough to take responsibility for his own actions.

I wake up every day and think everything sure is awful, but then I ask the Lord what I can do to make it better.

I spent 43 years of my life in anger and I know what it can do… Now I pray a lot. I do whatever I need to do to keep me out of that anger, out of that place where I can’t grow and be better.