Langston Hughes Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

Wear it
Like a banner
For the proud —
Not like a shroud.

Langston Hughes
Both of them were very good and kind - the one who went to church and the one who didn't. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.

Langston Hughes
Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen!

Langston Hughes
Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.

Langston Hughes
Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

Langston Hughes
For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything.

Langston Hughes
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.

Langston Hughes
It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.

Langston Hughes
These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored.

Langston Hughes
Don't come giving me, who's old enough to die and too near blind to create anything any more anyhow, a great big banquet that you eat up in honor of your own stomachs as much as in honor of me- who's toothless and can't eat.

Langston Hughes
Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

Langston Hughes
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.

Langston Hughes
I know how to handle women who act like ladies, but my landlady ain't no lady. Sometimes I even wish I was living with my wife again so I could have my own place and not have no landladies.

Langston Hughes
I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.

Langston Hughes
One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.

Langston Hughes
A world I dream where black or white, whatever race you be, will share the bounties of the earth and every man is free

Langston Hughes
When I were a young man, I used to play baseball and steal bases just like Jackie Robinson. If the empire would rule me out, I would get mad and hit the empire.

Langston Hughes
When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

Langston Hughes
Sometimes I wish the public were equally aware of the men of our race in the cultural fields. You, for instance, have you ever bought a book by a Negro writer?

Langston Hughes
If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed.

Langston Hughes
But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.

Langston Hughes
Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.

Langston Hughes
This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.

Langston Hughes
Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.

Langston Hughes
Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.

Langston Hughes
Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling.

Langston Hughes
AND ONE SHOULD LOVE ONE'S COUNTRY
FOR ONE'S COUNTRY IS YOUR MAMA.

Langston Hughes
Anyday, one can walk down the street in a big city and see a thousand people. Any photographer can photograph these people - but very few photographers can make their prints not only reproductions of the people taken, but a comment upon them - or more, a comment upon their lives - or more still, a comment upon the social order that creates these lives.

Langston Hughes
The first of the month falls every month, too, North or South. And them white folks who sends bills never forgets to send them-the phone bill, the furniture bill, the water bill, the gas bill, insurance, house rent.

Langston Hughes
Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

Langston Hughes