Black Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Six officers, belonging to privateers that were taken by the enemy, made their escape last night. They inform me they were taken by the last fleet that came in. They had about six thousand foreign troops on board, one quarter of which had the black scurvy, and died very fast.

Nathanael Greene

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

Peter Watts (author)

Behind her chair, from a wall covered in a very expensive velvet-flock paper, a portrait of her grandfather looked down. He had been an Episcopalian bishop, but the picture showed him in the costume of a New England gentleman keeping up the Old English custom of riding to hounds: red coat, brown boots, distinguished with a white dog-collar and black silk front.
Hugh referred to him as being dressed to kill.
The salad was replaced—though Hugh had sampled only a mouthful of his—by a dish of cold fish with mayonnaise. He didn't even touch this course. He was suddenly afraid of it because it had come from the sea.

I dated a guy who was half-black, but he dumped me because I'm such a loser. Wow, I shouldn't say things like that, I'm such a pessimist … he's actually half-white.

Sarah Silverman

The Bush plan is economic treason against the American worker. That "civil rights leaders" are silent about the dispossession of the black working class, that unions are not marching to denounce this sellout of blue-collar and white-collar America, only tells us that the amorality of the transnational corporation has infected both. Solidarity be damned, it is all about money now.

The glow dies down, and she's standing at the end of my bed—the one who's been following me around leaving feather messages. I take in the torn fishnets, plaid mini-kilt, shiny, riveted breastplate with leather straps at the sides and a worn Great Temolo decal near the left shoulder. Her wings are a crazy black-and-white-checkered pattern, like they've been spray-painted at a body shop to look like hipster sneakers.

She boasted the general battle-ax demeanor of an especially strict governess. This was the kind of woman who took her tea black, smoked cigars after midnight, played a mean game of cribbage, and kept a bevy of repulsive little dogs. Alexia liked her immediately.

Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.

Michael Crichton

A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Our study clearly shows that employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak.

William Julius Wilson

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.

Cormac McCarthy

The FBI was most disturbed by the Panthers' survival programs providing community service. The popular free breakfast program, in which the party provided free hot breakfasts to children in Black communities throughout the United States, was, as already noted, a particular thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover. Finding little to criticize about the program objectively, the Bureau decided to destroy it.

As queen, Farah achieved almost immediate popularity. She had several features that pleased the Iranians: she was 'fully Iranian' and also worthy of honour because she descended from the family of the Prophet. She was a brunette with deep black eyes of the kind most Persians cherish. (The Shah's outlandish taste for blondes was not shared by his compatriots.) Farah appeared to be slightly taller than the Shah, but this could not be held against her. The new queen's athletic physique and her well-publicised love of sports disconcerted some religious circles, but even the more conservative Iranians now understood that times were changing.

Nepotism. My brother's son, André Fischer, was the drummer in the band Rufus, with Chaka Khan. Apparently, the arrangements I made for their early records were appreciated, so in the following years I was hired almost exclusively by black artists. I am surprised that my arrangements are now considered one of the prerequisites for a hit album. People feel that they make a song sound almost classical.

What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.

Ignatius of Loyola

In all things that are purely social we [black and white] can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

Booker T. Washington

Despair is a black leather jacket that everyone looks good in. Hope is a frilly, pink dress that exposes the knees.

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Lewis Allen (director)

To be young, gifted and black
Is where it's at!

White people don't need a law against rape, but if you fill this room up with your normal black bucks, you would, because niggers are basically primitive animals.

Some say an army of cavalry or of infantry or a fleet of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is whatever one loves.