Anna Julia Cooper Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

Agnosticism has nothing to impart. Its sermons are the exhortations of one who convinces you he stands on nothing and urges you to stand there too.

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
The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

Anna Julia Cooper
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
Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society.

Anna Julia Cooper
Women are more quiet. They don't feel called to mount a barrel and harangue by the hour every time they imagine they have produced an idea.

Anna Julia Cooper
The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.

Anna Julia Cooper
It is the curse of minorities in this power-worshipping world that either from fear or from an uncertain policy of expedience they distrust their own standards and hesitate to give voice to their deeper convictions, submitting supinely to estimates and characterizations of themselves as handed down by a not unprejudiced dominant majority.

Anna Julia Cooper
On the liberation of women:
The world has had to limp along with the wobbling gait and one-sided hesitancy of a man with one eye. Suddenly the bandage is removed from the other eye and the whole body is filled with light. It sees a circle where before it saw a segment. The darkened eye restored, every member rejoices with it.

Anna Julia Cooper
The great, the fundamental need of any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice; and there cannot be heroism, devotion, or sacrifice in a primarily skeptical spirit.

Anna Julia Cooper
The impulse of humanity toward social progress is like the movement in the currents of a great water system, from myriad sources and under myriad circumstances and conditions, beating onward, ever onward toward its eternity, the Ocean.

Anna Julia Cooper
The majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while that women aspire to higher education.... The three R's, a littlemusic and a good deal of dancing, a first rate dress-maker and a bottle of magnolia balm, are quite enough generally to render charming any woman possessed of tact and the capacity for worshipping masculinity.

Anna Julia Cooper
Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant what I fear it still means to some men in our own day - respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort.

Anna Julia Cooper
We need men who can let their interest and gallantry extend outside the circle of their aesthetic appreciation; men who can be a father, a brother, a friend to every weak, struggling unshielded girl.

Anna Julia Cooper
If our vaunted rule of the people does not breed nobler men and women than monarchies have done it must and will inevitably give place to something better.

Anna Julia Cooper
We are the heirs of a past which was not our fathers' molding.

Anna Julia Cooper
Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.'

Anna Julia Cooper
As in an icicle the agnostic abides alone. The vital principle is taken out of all endeavor for improving himself or bettering hisfellows. All hope in the grand possibilities of life are blasted.

Anna Julia Cooper
True progress is never made by spasms. Real progress is growth. It must begin in the seed.

Anna Julia Cooper
So long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon; with one face (the man's face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was disc or sphere.

Anna Julia Cooper
One of the most singular facts about the unwritten history of this country is the consummate ability with which Southern influence, Southern ideas and Southern ideals, have from the very beginning even up to the present day, dictated to and domineered over the brain and sinew of this nation.

Anna Julia Cooper
If women were once permitted to read Sophocles and work with logarithms, or to nibble at any side of the apple of knowledge, there would be an end forever to their sewing on buttons and embroidering slippers.

Anna Julia Cooper
All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs.

Anna Julia Cooper
Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.

Anna Julia Cooper
The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem...

Anna Julia Cooper
For woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free...

Anna Julia Cooper
Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development — begun now and ending never. And a life made true cannot confine itself — it must reach out and twine around every pulsing interest within reach of its uplifting tendrils.

Anna Julia Cooper
Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken.

Anna Julia Cooper
I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.

Anna Julia Cooper
I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.

Anna Julia Cooper