African American Quotations (K to Y)
- "Ask any athlete: We all hurt at times. I'm asking my body to go through seven different tasks. To ask it not to ache would be too much."
-- Jackie Joyner-Kersee - "Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people."
-- Coretta Scott King - "There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. - "A man who won't die for something is not fit to live."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. - "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. - "Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. - "A riot is the language of the unheard."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. - "An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of inprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Men of Vision - "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. - "Within our dreams and aspirations we find our opportunities."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "A fighter never knows when it's the last bell. He doesn't want to face that."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "Words cannot describe that feeling - of being a man, of being a gladiator, of being a warrior. It's irreplaceable."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "I consider myself blessed. I consider you blessed. We've all been blessed with God-given talents. Mine just happens to be beating people up."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "My ambition is not to be just a good fighter. I want to be great, something special."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "We assume the risks. That's what makes a great champion."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "We care, but you can't let that be a burden to you."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "We're all endowed with God- given talents. Mine happens to be hitting people in the head."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "You have to know you can win. You have to think you can win. You have to feel you can win."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "I wanted to do in boxing what Bruce Lee was able to do in karate. Lee was an artist, and, like him, I try to get beyond the fundamentals of my sport. I want my fights to be seen as plays."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard - "Schooling is what happens inside the wall of the school, some of which is educational. Education happens everywhere, and it happens from the moment a child is born -- some say before -- until it dies."
-- Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, A World of Ideas - "I made the most of my ability and I did my best with my title."
-- Joe Louis
Library, 1969 - "There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires."
-- Nelson Mandela- "If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that the state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch."
-- Thurgood Marshall- "Mere access to the courthouse doors does not by itself assure a proper functioning of the adversary process."
-- Thurgood Marshall- "There will always be some curve balls in your life. Teach your children to thrive in that adversity."
-- Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe- "I don't believe that I personally have been changed by the money. The bad thing is people assume you've changed because now you have money."
-- Shaquille O'Neal- "For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world."
-- Jesse Owens, Jesse: The Man Who Outran Hitler- "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?"
-- Satchel Paige- "I had no idea that history was being made. I was just tired of giving up."
-- Rosa Parks- "I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people."
-- Rosa Parks- "Even when I was little, I was big."
-- William "Refridgerator" Perry- "The ultimate of being successful is the luxury of giving yourself the time to do what you want to do."
-- Leontyne Price- "Music is the greatest communication in the world. Even if people don't understand the language that you're singing in, they still know good music when they hear it."
-- Lou Rawls- "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he (Saddam) can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
-- Condoleezza Rice- "Saddam Hussein has had 12 years to disarm... Enough is enough. It's time to bring this to a close. But we believe that the Security Council should and probably will exercise its responsibilities."
-- Condoleezza Rice- "The president has always said that war is his last choice, not his first, his last choice, so this entire process has been to try to find a diplomatic solution to this problem. We've lost ground in finding a diplomatic solution because the world has not spoken with one voice to Saddam Hussein."
-- Condoleezza Rice- "Foreign policy is ultimately about security -- about defending our people, our society and our values, such as freedom, tolerance, openness and diversity."
-- Condoleezza Rice- "We will defend the peace by opposing and preventing violence by terrorists and outlaw regimes."
-- Condoleezza Rice- "What success I achieved in the theater is due to the fact that I have always worked just as hard when there were ten people in the house as when there were thousands. Just as hard in Springfield, Illinois as on Broadway."
-- Bill "Bojangles" Robinson- "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."
-- Jackie Robinson- "Above anything else, I hate to lose."
-- Jackie Robinson- "Are you looking for a Negro who won't fight back?"
-- Jackie Robinson- "I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me . . . All I ask is that you respect me as a human being."
-- Jackie Robinson- "I've been riding on Cloud Nine since the election, and I don't think I'll ever come down. Today, everything is complete."
-- Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the major leagues and the first Black to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame
Jackie Robinson Stealing Home, May 18... - "Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life."
-- Jackie Robinson- "The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time."
-- Jackie Robinson- "The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it."
-- Jackie Robinson- "There's not an American in this country free until every one of us is free."
-- Jackie Robinson- "When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you until it seems that you cannot hold on for a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe- "Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done."
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe- "The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end."
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe- "If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it."
-- Sojourner Truth- "Religion without humanity is very poor human stuff."
-- Sojourner Truth- "I was free, but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land."
-- Harriet Tubman- "I will never give in to old age until I become old. And I'm not old yet!"
-- Tina Turner- "Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shal relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful."
-- Alice Walker, Temple of my Familiar- "Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for?"
-- Alice Walker- "No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow."
-- Alice Walker- "Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God."
-- Alice Walker- "Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence."
-- Alice Walker- "You know that you can't really make much of a difference in things until you change yourself."
-- Alice Walker- "Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender."
-- Alice Walker- "Tea to the English is just a picnic indoors."
-- Alice Walker, The Color Purple- "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."
-- Alice Walker, The Color Purple- "We are the people we've been waiting for."
-- Alice Walker- "This feeling of being loved and supported by the universe in general and by certain recognizable spirits in particular is bliss."
-- Alice Walker- "The world is not good enough--we must make it better."
-- Alice Walker- "The more I wonder... the more I love."
-- Alice Walker- "The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account."
-- Alice Walker- "Surely the earth can be saved by all the people who insist on love."
-- Alice Walker- "Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you."
-- Alice Walker- "Oh - Just can't keep a real good woman down."
-- Alice Walker- "Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work."
-- Booker T. Washington- "Great men cultivate love...only little men cherish a spirit of hatred."
-- Booker T. Washington- "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."
-- Booker T. Washington- "Remember that everyone's life is measured by the power that individual has to make the world better—this is all life is."
-- Booker T. Washington- "A film just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, "Oh, I don't like it." One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin."
-- Denzel Washington- "Every punch that's thrown is mine. Every punch that's caught, I catch."
-- Denzel Washington- "Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life."
-- Denzel Washington- "I don't want 'color neutral' parts. I mean, I'm a black man. I bring whoever I am to whatever I do. I don't want any neutral part -- I want color in my life."
-- Denzel Washington- "I made a commitment to completely cut out drinking and anything that might hamper me from getting my mind and body together. And the floodgates of goodness have opened upon me-spiritually and financially."
-- Denzel Washington- "I say luck is when an opportunity comes along and you're prepared for it."
-- Denzel Washington- "A person wrapped up in himself makes a very small package."
-- Denzel Washington- "Luck is where opportunity meets preparation."
-- Denzel Washington- "My concern is raising the standard of the work, not complaining about somebody not voting for me."
-- Denzel Washington- "My mother never gave up one me. I messed up in school so much they were sending me home, but my mother sent me right back."
-- Denzel Washington- "One had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat caught in a trap."
-- Ida B. Wells- "There must always be a remedy for wrong and injustice if we only know how to find it."
-- Ida B. Wells- "The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness."
-- Jessamyn West- "As an essayist I don't believe in the fiction of an anonymous observer. Rather than the sham of objectivity, I think you should put you perspective up front. That's only fair to the reader."
-- Ralph Wiley- "I was raised to believe that excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism. And that's how I operate my life."
-- Oprah Winfrey- "Nonvoting is a fruitless temper tantrum."
-- Bruce Wright- "The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."
-- Malcolm X- "You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. Revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way."
-- Malcolm X- "It is a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing."
-- Andrew Young- "You can't look forward and backward at the same time."
-- Coleman Young- "We need to dream big dreams, propose grandiose means if we are to recapture the excitement, the vibrancy, and pride we once had."
-- Coleman Young- "There is no brilliant single stroke that is going to transform the water into wine or straw into gold."
-- Coleman Young- "I've learned over a period of years there are setbacks when you come up against the immovable object; sometimes the object doesn't move."
-- Coleman Young - "There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires."
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From Slavery to Freedom:
A History of African Americans
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