Black Quotes
-
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.
-
The black geeks of the world, we feel like we don't have a home.
-
[On being first black woman to earn a PhD in economics and first black woman admitted to Pennsylvania bar:] I never looked for anybody to hold the door open for me. I knew well that the only way I could get that door open was to knock it down: because I knocked all of them down.
-
I've never drunk coffee. I'm convinced it has something to do with why my skin is good. I have either mint, green or black tea.
-
'Black Hole Sun' was written in a car when I was driving home from the studio one night. Pretty much everything that you hear was written in my head.
-
I do detest all offices - all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. And I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much.
-
Black women as a group have never been fools. We couldn't afford to be.
-
I don't mind doing the green-screen stuff at all, and in fact it's a lot like black-box theater, which I did plenty of in New York.
-
There's no white comic that sells tickets to black people like me. They're going to get their hair done, get a new outfit, and come out to see a white dude.
-
At the time when I was in college, Oscar Grant had just lost his life in Oakland, Calif. He was an unarmed young black male who had a record. And at the time when his death was making headlines, more people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life.
-
I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's not a black-and-white type of thing down there. It's a very cultural place. Everybody has the same accent. It's not like if you're white we can't hang with you or anything like that. So it's easy for us to call each other out on our things.
-
There are ogres and black beasts out there; you have to be constantly on guard.
-
There was a certain feeling I developed as a young person for black people. Somehow they were able to get pleasure out of things that I couldn't see them enjoying. I heard them sing a lot, and I didn't hear white folks going down the cotton rows singing that much.
-
At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
-
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that we should be separate, all right, but in this separate state or separate existence, the black man should be given the opportunity and the incentive to do for himself what the white man has done for himself.
-
Bits and pieces flung into the universe, sticking in the sky like cotton balls on a jet black velcro surface.
-
If you like strange, specific stuff - that's a nerd. Kanye West is a black nerd. He likes strange, specific stuff. If you go up to Kanye West and say, 'Hey, what are your favorite things?' He'll be like, 'Robots and teddy bears.' That's a nerd.
-
We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited 'The Black Dwarf' in 1968-69.
-
Chavez made a compete fool of himself in front of the entire world while giving the U.N. a black eye. But the real losers are the Venezuelan people who have to put up with this unstable character every day.
-
I'd spend every summer in Longview on my grandfather's farm. It was a tiny little town divided by a river, which was the segregation line: that side white, this side black. And meanwhile, I lived in Compton - basically, another whole world sealed into 10 square blocks. It's interesting how insular an environment can be.
-
I never hated hip-hop. It became the new rock and roll. It became the biggest thing that Africans have ever done in the history of the Americas. Hip-hop put more black Americans on than anything before it. It fed more people. It allowed them to diversify into clothing lines and billion-dollar headphone companies.
-
I have one good characteristic: I'm a pessimist, so I always imagine the worst - always. To me, the future is a black hole.
-
When I drive through a field, I want to see green grass sometimes, and I don't want to see black and white.
-
I'm half Jewish, I'm half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It's like, What is he doing?
