African American Quotes
250 African American Quotes
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
James Baldwin
The future is like heaven – everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
James Baldwin
You cannot fix what you will not face.
James Baldwin
The paradox of education is precisely this, that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
James Baldwin
A ghetto can be improved in only one way: out of existence.
James Baldwin
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the utmost inhuman excesses.
James Baldwin
I know that what I am asking is impossible.
James Baldwin
It testified to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.
James Baldwin
I stated reading. I read everything I could get my hands on… By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
James Baldwin
No matter who says what, in fact, Negroes and whites in this country are related to each other.
James Baldwin
If you’re afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
James Baldwin
You don’t make resolutions about something you are going to do next year. No! You decide to write a book: the book may be finished twenty years from now, but you’ve got to start it now.
James Baldwin
The human fact is this: that one cannot escape anything one has done. One has got to pay for it. You either pay for it willingly or pay for it unwillingly.
James Baldwin
If I hadn’t gone away, I would never have been able to see it; and if I was unable to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it.
James Baldwin
Education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach some people to think; and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn’t be something they cannot think about. If there is one thing they can not think about, very shortly they can’t think about anything.
James Baldwin
You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.
James Baldwin
Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck – but, most of all, endurance.
James Baldwin
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action.
James Baldwin
A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place.
George Washington Carver
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.
George Washington Carver
Even if the child does not become an agriculturalist, or a farmer, these things all have a tendency to make the child think, and that is what we are trying to teach him – to think.
George Washington Carver
No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without living behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.
George Washington Carver
Slavery was a hard and terrible school.
George Washington Carver
The primary idea in all my work was to help the farmer and fill the poor man’s empty dinner pail… My idea is to help the ‘man farthest down’, this is why I have made every process just as simple as I could to put it within his reach.
George Washington Carver
I am more interested in the ideas expressed than the mechanics of writing.
George Washington Carver
From a child I had an inordinate desire for knowledge.
George Washington Carver
To those who already love nature, I need only to say, pursue its truths with a new zest, and give to the world the value of the answers to the many questions you have asked the greatest of all teachers – Mother Nature.
George Washington Carver
My work is that of conservation.
George Washington Carver
Nature study is agriculture, and agriculture is nature study – if properly taught.
George Washington Carver
Here is a breakfast food. I am very sorry that you cannot taste this, so I will taste it for you. [Laughter] Now this is a combination and, by the way, one of the finest breakfast foods that you or anyone else has ever seen. It is a combination of the sweet potato and the peanut, and if you will pardon a little digression here.
George Washington Carver
Here is the original salted peanut, for which there is an increasing demand, and here is a very fine peanut bar. The peanut bar is coming into prominence in a way that very few of us recognize, and the manufacturers of this peanut bar have learned that it is a very difficult matter to get a binder for it, something to stick it together. That is found in the sweet potato syrup. …
George Washington Carver
Now here is a very attractive product — an instant coffee. … Here is a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. … Now here is a very highly flavored sauce that imitates the Chinese sauce that enters into chop suey and the various Chinese confections that they are so very fond of. …
George Washington Carver
[Mr. CAREW: Did you make all of these products yourself?] Yes, sir. They are made there in the research laboratory. That is what the research laboratory is for. … The sweet potato products now number 107 up to date. … The peanut products are going to beat the sweet-potato products by far. I have just begun with the peanut. So what is going to come of it why we do not know. This is the very last thing. Now this is a pomade. That is, it is a face cream and will be attractive to the ladies …
George Washington Carver
If we think of how the peanut is used, it is the only thing that is universally used among civilized and uncivilized people, and all sorts of animals like it, and I do not know of a single case — that is, I mean normal — that complains because peanuts hurt them.
George Washington Carver
Of all the get-rich-quick schemes there is probably none more productive of delusion than that of poultry raising on paper. And yet, with proper facilities and applied intelligence… handsome returns can be had from poultry.
George Washington Carver
What’s the matter? Too much sun? Too little sun?
George Washington Carver
When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.
George Washington Carver
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