Black History Month Quotations
- "All the courage and competitiveness of Jackie Robinson affects me to this day. If I patterned my life after anyone it was him, not because he was the first black baseball player in the majors but because he was a hero. "
-- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - "I never thought of losing, but now that it's happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life."
-- Muhammad Ali statement after losing his first fight to Ken Norton, March 31, 1973 - "I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me."
-- Muhammad Ali The Greatest (1975) - "Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise."
-- Maya Angelou "Still I rise," And Still I Rise (1978) - "When you learn, teach. When you get, give. "
-- Maya Angelou - "Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows one to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style. "
-- Maya Angelou - "Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know."
-- Louis S. Armstrong (1900-1971) reply when asked what jazz is - "Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can."
-- Arthur Ashe quoted in Sports Illustrated - "All racists are irresponsible. "
-- James Baldwin - "People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead."
-- James BaldwinAfrican American Wisdom
by Reginald McKnight - collection of wisdom, reflections, and folk sayings by Americans of African descent includes the words of James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Cosby, Harriet Tubman, and Zora Neale Hurston. - "Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law. … I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with the pain."
-- James Baldwin - "If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything . . . that smacks of discrimination or slander."
-- Mary McLeod Bethune "Certain Unalienable Rights," What the Negro Wants - "If people believe that they are marrying out of love and free choice rather than out of duty, they are more likely to decide, if love should die, that the free choice to join together is no more significant than the free choice to part, and to look for love elsewhere; those married out of duty expect less love to begin with, and what duty has brought together, duty may keep together."
-- Stephen L. Carter, Integrity - "Just like you can buy grades of silk, you can buy grades of justice. "
-- Ray Charles - "The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image."
-- Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) The Marrow of Tradition (1901) - "You're either part of the solution or part of the problem."
-- L. Eldridge Cleaver (1935-1998) speech given in San Francisco in 1968 - "There isn't a certain time we should set aside to talk about God. God is part of our every waking moment. "
-- Marva Collins - "The past is a ghost, the future a dream. All we ever have is now. "
-- Bill Cosby - "There is no labor a person does that is undignified; if they do it right."
-- Bill Cosby - "Life is short, and it's up to you to make it sweet."
-- Sadie Delany (1889-1999) Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, written with sister Bessie Delany (1993)
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