Afeni Shakur

“Whatever else anyone says he was, he may have been. But Tupac really was a great American artist. The passage of time allows us to see things as they really are: We see the poetry; we see the personality; we see different sides.”

“I live with truth.”

“Trust me, you can't change anything without causing some degree of disruption. It's impossible, that is exactly what change is. Some people are uncomfortable with the disruption that change causes, but the disruption is necessary if anything is going to change.”

“Anger is an all-consuming fire that will burn you and everyone else around you. Where is the justice in that?”

“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.”

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

“The critics never ever one time fairly criticized my son.”

“The Woodruff Library Archives has done a phenomenal job archiving my son's materials.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“We need to read history from the source.”

“Revolution is Tupac showing a young artist that he can scribble in a notebook and it's worth a lot.”

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

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

“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 think what it was is that Tupac was extremely passionate, very honest and raw in his approach to communicating. He understood communicating. And I think he just did it from a deep place within.”