The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed – Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
Humor is when the joke’s on you but hits the other fellow first – before it boomerangs.
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.
I asked you, baby, If you understood- You told me that you didn’t, But you thought you would.
To some people Love is given, To others Only Heaven.
I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied.
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.
Good evening, daddy! Ain’t you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace.
Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.
A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.
Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest.
I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong.
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
There’s a certain amount of traveling in a dream deferred.
When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left.
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.
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.
Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.
When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.