Lillian Smith Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open.

Lillian Smith
Faith and doubt both are needed—not as antagonists but working side by side—to take us around the unknown curve.

Lillian Smith
Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

Lillian Smith
The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

Lillian Smith
I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.

Lillian Smith
Man, born of woman, has found it a hard thing to forgive her for giving him birth. The patriarchal protest against the ancient matriarch has borne strange fruit through the years.

Lillian Smith
Words are magic: they can whistle out their evil in a man, but they can also persuade the sleeping angel in him to wake up and speak its wisdom. But silence can never create either excellence or virtue.

Lillian Smith
For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into the masses. And where is the David who can slay this giant?

Lillian Smith
Courage is a word for others to use about us, not something we can seek for ourselves.

Lillian Smith
Grandma was a kind of first-aid station, or a Red Cross nurse, who took up where the battle ended, accepting us and our little sobbing sins, gathering the whole of us into her lap, restoring us to health and confidence by her amazing faith in life and in a mortal's strength to meet it.

Lillian Smith
All the movements in the world, all the laws, the drives, the edicts will never do what personal relationships can do and must do.

Lillian Smith
There is no going alone on a journey. Whether one explores strange lands or Main Street or one's own back yard, always invisible traveling companions are close by: the giants and pygmies of memory, of belief, pulling you this way and that, not letting you see the world life-size but insisting that you measure it by their own height and weight.

Lillian Smith
Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation.

Lillian Smith
Crises are two edged; they always create possibilities for both evil and good.

Lillian Smith
Things are breaking and thawing: we must hold on to that. A frozen river is a quiet thing; in thaw it is a roaring monster. We are in thaw in the South: there is bound to be much noise, much individual cruelty, much collective madness. But underneath, change is taking place — not only in streets and places but in human hearts.

Lillian Smith
We in America – and men across the earth – have trapped ourselves with that word equality, which is inapplicable to the genus man. I wish we would forget it. Stop its use in our country: Let the communists have it. It isn't fit for men who fling thei... r dreams across the skies. It is fit only for a leveling down of mankind.

Lillian Smith
She stood at the gate, waiting; behind her the swamp, in front of her Colored Town, beyond it, all Maxwell. Tall and slim and white in the dusk, the girl stood there, hands on the picket gate.

Lillian Smith
There is no person, no group of people, no nation, that does not make grave mistakes. The test is: can they rectify their mistake?

Lillian Smith
Change means leaving one's memories, one's sins, one's ancient prison, the room where one was born.

Lillian Smith
Loyalty is a verbal switch-blade used by little and big bosses to force us quickly to accept a questionable situation which our intelligence and conscience should reject.

Lillian Smith
There is nothing more powerful than ignorance, not even intelligence.

Lillian Smith
Change in a democracy can be brought about quickly or slowly. The speed depends on its people's honesty of mind, their values, their humility and knowledge and insight; and, above all else, on the will to act, once they realize the need for action.

Lillian Smith
There are two kinds of ordeals, of course: those we choose and those that seem to choose us.

Lillian Smith
Questions which cannot be freed by words find it easy to slip into the blood stream, changing the body's chemistry, changing a whole life, sometimes.

Lillian Smith
Great story tellers show us an image of themselves, their deepdown selves, but they show us a picture of us, too. Always, like an after-image, a visual echo, we see ourselves as we listen.

Lillian Smith