Lillian Smith Short Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lillian Smith
It is not the physical part of war that sickens me as it is what is happening to our minds and feelings.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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