Top 100 Being Black Quotes
#1. On the one hand, there is no reason that a black person needs to live a portion of his or her life being concerned about the people of color around him. On the other hand, if you don't you're crazy.
Henry Hampton
#2. I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.
Octavia Butler
#3. I feel that sometimes, holding yourself as black, saying that is your sole identity, can sometimes stand in your way of being a member of the humanity of man, being a member of the family of the divine.
Giancarlo Esposito
#4. Deep within, every human being hoards a pitch-black riddle. The darkness of the iris is nothing other than the starless night, the darkness deep in the eye is nothing other than the darkness of the universe.
Lars Gustafsson
#5. For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.
Hilton Als
#6. A film fable so structured that all alchemical searchings are clearly filmwise (gold being discovered cinematically in each sequence ot mixed black-and-white and color) so that when the drama-discovery is actually made, it acts as a deliberate anti-climax of aesthetic perfection.
Stan Brakhage
#7. With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.
Carrie Brownstein
#8. Barry Bonds is outspoken. I think that the people of Pittsburgh felt, it's a syndrome of you've got to apologize for being successful if you're successful (as well as) black and outspoken.
Dave Parker
#9. You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.
Frank Black
#10. Being a mathematician is a bit like being a manic depressive: you spend your life alternating between giddy elation and black despair.
Steven G. Krantz
#11. The world we live in is made up of polar opposites, black/white, male/female, night/day, and a human being who possesses both masculine and feminine - vulnerability and strength - is intriguing to us, whether they be a singer or actor or dancer, intrigues us, because THAT Is who we really are.
RuPaul
#12. When you have the national narrative being "crack is awful and black people are using it," why go against that narrative when you want to get that publication in The New York Times or wherever? It encourages people to play right into it.
Carl Hart
#13. Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president.
Henry Louis Gates
#14. Thick smoke like a herd of black horses was rising over the massive building and being blown around by the wind.
Ismail Kadare
#15. I never said I wasn't Black ... I want to make that very clear. I said, I am not African-American. I never expected my personal beliefs and comments to spark such emotion in people. I think it is only positive when we can openly discuss race and being labeled in America.
Raven-Symone
#16. These little black circular shapes were a result of him being a carrier of a parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii
Soroosh Shahrivar
#17. The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.
Michelle Alexander
#18. It's just cheaper to be White in America than it is to be Black, because of educational advances, because of the police incidents, because of the poverty we grow up in as African-Americans. So, it's just cheaper in this country if you're born a Caucasian than being born a Black person.
Warren Ballentine
#19. I certainly know about the oppression and prejudices of being black and a woman and from the South.
Clarice Taylor
#20. The last thing he felt was Bethany being pulled from his limp arms. A finality of black crashed over him in waves he couldn't surface from, welcoming him into the nothingness that dug in deep, refusing to ever let him go.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#21. What I find astounding is that we've had a president who is black in office for the past eight years, who gets most of his funding from the liberal elite in Hollywood. Yet, there are not very many roles for people of color. How can that be? And why is it just now being addressed?
Stacey Dash
#22. For me the music community was always like a model for what could be. The way people would play together, just harmony and being - old guys and young guys, black guys and white guys. It was setting an example for what the rest of us could be.
Bill Frisell
#23. The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment's peace - and even whole-being rejuvenation - by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.
Eric Maisel
#24. I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'
Naya Rivera
#25. The black woman had had to struggle against being a person of great strength.
Dorothy Height
#26. When I was 24 I went to Nigeria and it was such a culture shock, growing up in Australia and suddenly being the only white man in this unit full of black men.
Bruce Beresford
#27. The double jeopardy of being black and female in a racist and sexist society may well make one less afraid of the sanctions against success. A non-subservient black woman is by definition a transgressive- she is the ultimate outsider.
Mamphela Ramphele
#28. I asked her if I was black or white. She replied You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!
James McBride
#29. While I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw;
For I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being....And I saw that it was holy
Black Elk
#30. Black people dance well because we start early - there's music being played everywhere. White people? They don't start dancing until they get to college, and by then, it's too late; the bottom don't move with the top no matter how hard they try.
Tracy Morgan
#32. But who would rush at a benighted man, and give him two black eyes for being blind?
Merle Shain
#33. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.
Robert Black
#34. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing.
John Green
#35. I love to cook, it's one of my most favorite things in the world. That's why I stopped being a vegetarian - I didn't want to serve people things I hadn't tasted myself.
Claudia Black
#36. I grew up being the girl who would always tune in to watch famous people talk about their careers, how they handled scandals and mega fame. I'm trying to pick up tips.
Rebecca Black
#37. Start a rumor about
peace taking over,
love being the new black,
and compassion going viral.
Khang Kijarro Nguyen
#38. Comedies in Hollywood is usually the path of least resistance when it comes to being black in Hollywood and putting movies together. They would rather make us laugh than cry, in some respect.
Ice Cube
#39. Perhaps I'm being too optimistic, but I think this country is finally ready for a black serial killer.
Anthony Jeselnik
#40. We all have things inside ourselves we can't kill,' I say, not sure which part of me would be better off dead: this monster self, or the normal one who wants nothing more than a little place on a little planet with his friends, the one who will have to live with being a killer.
Holly Black
#42. A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.
Edsger Dijkstra
#43. Janeane Garofalo ended up, in a sense, being pushed by the media into becoming a pundit.
Lewis Black
#44. With stage, you feel completely like you're just in a bubble. I love not being able to see anything. I love coming out and I can't see anything because the lights are so bright and it's pitch black. That's ideal for me, that's when I have the best time.
Bill Nighy
#45. I did it to myself. It wasn't society ... it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.
Ray Charles
#46. We're always trailing, as far as the amount of roles that are written for us and the films that are being made that have black characters in them. I don't know if that's going to change.
Don Cheadle
#47. Sometimes life demands things of you, that just the fact of being alive means for allowing for possibilites that may be far from what you'd planned or even hoped.
Robin Black
#48. Whenever Black succeeds in assuming the initiative in maintaining it to a successful conclusion, the sporting spirit of the chess lover feels gratified, because it shows that the resources of the game are far from being exhausted.
Savielly Tartakower
#49. I think I'm doing a service to black women by portraying myself as a sex machine. I mean, what's wrong with being a sex machine, darling? Sex is large, sex is life, sex is as large as life, so it appeals to anyone that's living, or rather it should.
Grace Jones
#50. As far as being a deliveryman is concerned, I see nothing wrong with being a delivery man. You know, black or white or Hispanic or Chinese or whatever, you know? It's a job.
Meshach Taylor
#51. My webmaster lives in Munich and is a very dear friend of mine. He is doing a great job on the site and it is constantly being updated and always will.
Jimmy Carl Black
#52. I love that as a black person I've experienced not being a minority. I think that's helped me to combat the minority mentality people can have here, which can stop them scaling the heights.
David Oyelowo
#53. Me being biracial, me being from Canada but having success in the States, I have all these moments in my life where I'm jumping roof to roof. Black to white. Singing and rapping.
Drake
#54. Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor; those who struggle are middle class.
Nikki Giovanni
#55. ...Mrs. Percy understood that staying beautiful all day long is the most important aspect of being married...
Tevin Hansen
#56. I started out with almost entirely black fans except for a little handful of people in the horror writers' community, and those people really liked horror, you know. They will go to any lengths and read whomever they can find because they like that feeling of being scared.
Tananarive Due
#57. No, I'm thinking about myself - my black old inside self, the real one, with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being absolutely wicked by making me realize my own sins.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#58. As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.
Claudia Rankine
#59. Larry Bird is overrated in a lot of areas ... Why does he get so much publicity? Because he's white. You never hear about a black player being the greatest.
Dennis Rodman
#60. My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me.
Bayard Rustin
#61. Don't be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black.
Bruce Mau
#62. Horns honked in our wake, and people stomped on their brakes at the sight of a black Mustang being pursued by an airborne chariot.
Kevin Hearne
#63. How much the pain grew inside him after Ossie died until the only way to deal with it was to throw himself into the fray. And the whole time, Vanessa's body was wrapped around him like she was the only one being strong as a shield while he stripped his life bare.
Melissa Cutler
#64. For instance, if you're a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn't know that any other black men were being pulled over, you would constantly in the back of your head be thinking, "What did I do?" rather than, "I didn't do anything, these are just the conditions I live under."
Claudia Rankine
#65. I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.
Peter Matthiessen
#66. I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave; even today, inside me, here, and here, I am still a free woman.
Manu Herbstein
#67. Sometimes in the black culture, being raised as an independent woman is misconstrued as someone who doesn't need a man. I think that's wrong. I think we all need someone.
Boris Kodjoe
#68. The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.
Jerry Leiber
#69. Native Americans were driven off their land. Lincoln even took part in the Black Hawk campaign against the Native Americans in Illinois. While they were being exterminated and driven off their land, Whites were collecting assets.
Ishmael Reed
#70. We've got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A's and speaking proper English: that's criminal.
Spike Lee
#71. In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.
H.G.Wells
#72. No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.
Anastasia Griffith
#73. If it's lawful to have a rifle club to kill pheasants, it should be just as lawful to have one to kill wolves or dogs that are being sicked on little black babies. In fact, it's constitutional. Article Number Two of the constitution guarantees the right of every citizen to own a rifle or a shot gun.
Malcolm X
#74. I had talked to my agent a lot over the years about not being interested in stereotypical "black films" [because] I didn't like the way they were representing black people over and over and over again in the same way.
Zoe Kravitz
#75. "Not being virulently and overtly racist against black people" and "treating gay people like human beings" are necessary conditions of greatness.
Mallory Ortberg
#76. It is utterly exhausting being Black in America - physically, mentally, and emotionally. While many minority groups and women feel similar stress, there is no respite or escape from your badge of color.
Marian Wright Edelman
#77. In America now every romantic comedy is interpreted politically. I can remember when I was promoting Black Hawk Down we were all being asked what it said about September 11th. Well, it was shot before that happened, so, nothing.
Eric Bana
#78. Interesting thing about being rich is once you pay your taxes, you're still rich.
Lewis Black
#79. It was with extreme difficulty that Nipper, the black-eyed, who looked on steadfastly, contained herself at this crisis, and, until the subsequent departure of Mrs. Chick. But the nursery being at length free of visitors, she made herself some recompense for her late restraint.
Charles Dickens
#80. Being black only helps them. Many times they get sponsors because they are black. And they have had a lot of advantages because they can always say, 'It's racism.' They can always come back and say, 'Because we are this color, things happen.'
Martina Hingis
#81. He just wasn't good at being a cross between a teddy bear and just a friend.
Shayla Black
#82. I think Justin Timberlake verges on being gay, he gets gay airplay. Britney gets loads as well. If you're male and you're black you're not going to get much play in a gay club.
Andy Bell
#83. A cicada whines,
his voice
Starting to drown through the rainy world,
No ripple of wind,
no sound but his song of black wings,
No song but the song of his black wings.
Such emptiness at the heart,
such emptiness at the heart of being,
Charles Wright
#84. It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed.
Henry Louis Gates
#85. I never had that thing about being black. If the whole world was like that, maybe there would be more harmony and love.
Tina Turner
#86. There's something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. It's a different perspective. It is a reflection as opposed to an interpretation, and I think we get a lot of interpretations about the lives of women that are not coming from women.
Ava DuVernay
#87. [Voicing a cartoon] feels like going down a mysterious but joyful black hole. Once you relax for 15 or 20 minutes, and really go, "I don't care if I look like an ass," it's really fun to see what happens. You know that nothing is being visually judged.
Jim Parsons
#88. We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.
Saul Williams
#89. The day that the black man takes an uncompromising step and realizes that he's within his rights, when his own freedom is being jeopardized, to use any means necessary to bring about his freedom or put a halt to that injustice, I don't think he'll be by himself.
Malcolm X
#90. Sometimes I'm a black. Not everyone realizes blackness has to be conferred upon you again and again. It's like getting your nails done. Or being pantsed. People assume I'm cool.
Laura Yes Yes
#91. Finally, the complexities of black relationships are being portrayed in television and film.
Lisa Nicole Carson
#92. There are two worlds out there - two Americas out there. If you're a white person, there's one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you're a brown or a black body, there's another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It's very close to the loss of your life.
Claudia Rankine
#93. I've gotten a firsthand view at the destruction that black men and black women not being able to stay and build healthy relationships has had on the black family and black children.
Hill Harper
#94. A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.
Zadie Smith
#95. Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.
Steven Biko
#96. There was a time I was no longer going to be black. I was going to be an 'intellectual.' When I was first looking around for colleges, thinking of colleges I couldn't afford to go to, I was thinking of being a philosopher. I began to understand then that much of my feelings about race were negative.
Walter Dean Myers
#97. I'm determined to disagree with people without being disagreeable. That's part of the empathy. Empathy doesn't just extend to cute little kids. You have to have empathy when you're talking to some guy who doesn't like black people.
Barack Obama
#98. I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.
Billy Collins
#99. Being crazy is not a pre-requisite for joining black ops." "No," said Daniel, thoughtfully. "But I think it helps.
Karen Miller
#100. Does it bother you, me being half naked all the time?
Stephenie Meyer
