Black Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Barack Obama

Ossie Davis

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

Vachel Lindsay

William Congreve

Black Elk

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there's the United States of America.

The crisis of black politics can only be resolved through the development of multiclass, multiracial, progressive political structures.

Manning Marable

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

The philosophy of Black Consciousness therefore expresses group pride and the determination of the black to rise and attain the envisaged self.... At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realization by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in foregoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family life.

Eleanor Holmes Norton

But however long you may have continued in rebellion, and how ever black and long the catalog of your sins, yet if you will now turn to God by a sincere repentance, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you shall not be cast out.

Archibald Alexander

Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.

This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of English—it is a problem for the Department of Justice…. Black or white, the criminal left is interested in power. It is not interested in promoting the renewal and reforms that make democracy work; it is interested in promoting those collisions and conflict that tear democracy apart.

The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.

Timothy Thomas Fortune

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

Long before winter came the chances had been diminished owing to the repeated delays in the advance that were caused by bad roads, and mud. The 'black earth' of the Ukraine could be turned into mud by ten minutes rain - stopping all movement until it dried. That was a heavy handicap in a race with time. It was, increased by a lack of railways in Russia - for bringing up supplies to our advancing troops. Another adverse factor was the way the Russians received continual reinforcements from their back areas, as they fell back. It seemed to us that as soon as one force was wiped out, the path was blocked by the arrival of a fresh force.

Gerd von Rundstedt

It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

If I could find anything blacker than black I'd use it.

J. M. W. Turner

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.

In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.

William Irwin Thompson

Colour is what gives jewels their worth. They light up and enhance the face. Nothing is more elegant than a black skirt and sweater worn with a sparkling multi-stoned necklace.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

Why should not I call my works 'symphonies', 'arrangements', 'harmonies', and 'nocturnes'?... The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell. My picture of 'Harmony in Grey and Gold' is an illustration of my meaning – as snow scene with a single black figure and lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture, Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp.

James McNeill Whistler

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

Ursula K. Le Guin

All has been looted, betrayed, sold;
black death's wing flashed ahead.

Recipe for Coffee:

Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

Work for black women has been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of black motherhood.

Patricia Hill Collins

Still falls the Rain —
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss —
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.