I purified my lips with sacred fire that I might speak of love, but when I opened my mouth to speak, I found myself mute.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.
We are all like the bright moon, we still have our darker side.
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Education sows not seeds in you, but makes your seeds grow.
Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.
The truly good is he who is one with all those who are deemed bad.
The tears that you spill, the sorrowful, are sweeter than the laughter of snobs and the guffaws of scoffers.
Let your best be for your friend...
The biggest thing in today’s sorrow is the memory of yesterday’s joy.
Always you have been told that work is a curse and labor a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.
Comfort comes into your house first as guest, then as a host, then finally as the master.
That racial categories were hardening at this moment put Boas’s statements directly at odds with an increasing public desire to believe in racial purity. White southerners were hysterical over the threat of “social equality” or what they took to mean the apocalyptic possibility of black men “ravishing” white women and passing on their “degenerate” traits to a “pure” white race.
In the preface to Southern Horrors, she wrote, “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service.
New statistical and racial identities forged out of raw census data showed that African Americans, as 12 percent of the population, made up 30 percent of the nation’s prison population. Although specially designed race-conscious laws, discriminatory punishments, and new forms of everyday racial surveillance had been institutionalized by the 1890s as a way to suppress black freedom, white social scientists presented the new crime data as objective, color-blind, and incontrovertible.
The captives were also forming a new identity, a diasporic Blackness, forged out of their collective fate, as they found strength in one another with every miserable day that passed.
New Orleans became the Walmart of people selling.
There is something idyllic about the landscape, but there is nothing innocent about the history of this place, where human beings corrupted nature to do great harm to humanity.
The poets and writers are trying to understand the reality of woman, but up to this day they have not understood the hidden secrets of her heart, because they look upon her from behind the sexual veil and see nothing but externals; they look upon her through the magnifying glass of hatefulness and find nothing except weakness and submission.