- "My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it, was all for my audience."
-- Cab Calloway - "Our creator is the same and never changes despite the names given Him by people here and in all parts of the world. Even if we gave Him no name at all, He would still be there, within us, waiting to give us good on this earth."
-- George Washington Carver - "When our thoughts -- which bring actions -- are filled with hate against anyone, Negro or white, we are in a living hell. That is as real as hell will ever be."
-- George Washington Carver - "No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind."
-- George Washington Carver - "Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater."
-- George Washington Carver - "We have become ninety-nine percent money mad. The method of living at home modestly and within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts."
-- George Washington Carver - "Love is a special word, and I use it only when I mean it. You say the word too much and it becomes cheap."
-- Ray Charles, Brother Ray
Jazz Portrait - Harlem, New York, 1958 - "I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me -- like food or water."
-- Ray Charles - "Affluence separates people. Poverty knits 'em together. You got some sugar and I don't; I borrow some of yours. Next month you might not have any flour; well, I'll give you some of mine."
-- Ray Charles - "My music had roots which I'd dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil."
-- Ray Charles - "Impossibilities are merely things of which we have not learned, or which we do not wish to happen."
-- Charles W. Chesnutt - "There's time enough, but none to spare."
-- Charles W. Chesnutt - "As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust."
-- Charles W. Chesnutt - "Selfishness is the most constant of human motives. Patriotism, humanity, or the love of God may lead to sporadic outbursts sweep away the heaped-up wrongs of centuries; but they languish at times, while the love of self works on ceaselessly, unwearyingly, burrowing always at the very root of life, and heaping up fresh wrongs for other centuries to sweep away. "
-- Charles W. Chesnutt - "Sins, like chickens, come home to roost."
-- Charles W. Chesnutt - "Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action, our problemas are most complex and, too often, silently borne."
-- Alice Childress - "Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possess it."
-- Kenneth B. Clarke - "History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood."
-- Eldridge Cleaver - "Respect commands itself and can neither be given nor withheld when it is due."
-- Eldridge Cleaver - "You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman."
-- Eldridge Cleaver - "When you educate a man you educate an individual, but when you educate a woman, you educate a nation."
-- Johnetta B. Cole - "I'm a musician at heart, I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.."
-- Nat King Cole - "Critics don't buy records. They get 'em free."
-- Nat King Cole - "I think I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy Gillespie and Bird. It was through their work that I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music."
-- John Coltrane - "Anger and humor are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to opression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury."
-- James Cone - "Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her. "
-- James Cone - "Truth knows no color; it appeals to intelligence."
-- James Cone - "One needs occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God. "
-- Anna Julia Cooper - "The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class -- it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity."
-- Anna Julia Cooper - "Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey."
-- Anna Julia Cooper - "A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones who need advice."
-- Bill Cosby, Fat Albert's Survival Kit - "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
-- Bill Cosby - "When you become senile, you won't know it."
-- Bill Cosby - "There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God."
-- Bill Cosby - "Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die."
-- Bill Cosby, Fatherhood - "Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry."
-- Bill Cosby - "The truth is that parents are not really interested in justice. They just want quiet."
-- Bill Cosby - "Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries."
-- Bill Cosby, Time Flies - "Let us now set forth one of the fundamental truths about marriage: the wife is in charge."
-- Bill Cosby, Love and Marriage - "Men and women belong to different species and communications between them is still in its infancy."
-- Bill Cosby - "The heart of marriage is memories; and if the two of you happen to have the same ones and can savor your reruns, then your marriage is a gift from the gods."
-- Bill Cosby - "I am certainly not an authority on love because there are no authorities on love, just those who've had luck with it and those who haven't."
-- Bill Cosby - "My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children."
-- Bill Cosby, Childhood - "Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them."
-- Bill Cosby - "The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic."
-- Bill Cosby - "Children today know more about sex than I or my father did."
-- Bill Cosby - "Train your head and hands to do, your head and heart to dare."
-- Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. - "Let stern lessons of yesterdays be your food, your drink, your rest."
-- Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. - "My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me."
-- Countee Cullen - "Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime."
-- Angela Davis - "Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo -- obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other."
-- Angela Davis - "For me, music and life are all about style. "
-- Miles Davis - "It's always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don't know where it comes from, it's just there and I don't question it."
-- Miles Davis - "Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change -- it can not only move us, it makes us move."
-- Ossie Davis - "Fame comes with its own standard. A guy who twitches his lips is just another guy with a lip twitch -- unless he's Humphrey Bogart."
-- Sammy Davis, Jr., Yes I Can
DJ Jewel - "Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted. "
-- Sammy Davis, Jr., Yes I Can - "Every people should be originators of their own destiny."
-- Martin Delany - "A serpent is a serpent, and none the less a viper, because it is nestled in the bosom of an honest-hearted man. "
-- Martin Delany - "In our dreams we are always young."
-- Sarah Louise Delany - "When you get real old, honey, you realizre there are certain things that just don't matter anymore. You lay it all on the table. There's a saying: Oly little children and old folks tell the truth."
-- Sarah Louise Delany - "It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake."
-- Frederick Douglass - "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
-- Frederick Douglass - "Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground."
-- Frederick Douglass - "When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind."
-- Frederick Douglass - "A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people."
-- Frederick Douglass - "Don't feel entitled to anything you didn't sweat and struggle for."
-- Marian Wright Edelman - "Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night."
-- Marian Wright Edelman - "People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests."
-- Marian Wright Edelman - "Speak truth to power."
-- Marian Wright Edelman - "Parents have become so convinced educators know what is best for children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts."
-- Marian Wright Edelman - "There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone."
-- Duke Ellington - "By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with. "
-- Duke Ellington - "Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did."
-- Duke Ellington - "America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description."
-- Ralph Ellison - "I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed."
-- Ralph Ellison - "The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing."
-- Ralph Ellison - "When I discover who I am, I'll be free."
-- Ralph Ellison - "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
-- Ralph Ellison - "To identify the enemy is to free the mind."
-- Mari Evans - "Our only hope is to control the vote."
-- Medgar Evers - "The gifts of God should be enjoyed by all citizens in Mississippi."
-- Medgar Evers
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The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Women's Literature
African American Communication & Identities:
Essential Readings
