Top 40 Black Folk Quotes
#1. But oh, my brothers, black folk ain't never goin' to be led from bondage without they has pride! Black folk ain't goin' to be free, they ain't goin' to have no spoonbread an' sweet cider less'n they studies to love they own selves. Only then will the first be last, and the last first.
William Styron
#2. Black folk, a lot of us lived as victims in a certain part of our history. And we had to really erase that tape. We're not victims. We are citizens.
Dorothy Cotton
#4. And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.
Ray Stannard Baker
#5. You got two black folk representing us through the Sixties. One of them was for violence, one was against it, and they both are dead.
Snoop Dogg
#6. There is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.
Bell Hooks
#7. There's sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folk's burden. Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.
Benjamin Todd Jealous
#8. I read a lot of W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote 'The Souls of Black Folk.'
Andre Holland
#9. As a teenager, my blackness was also questioned by some of the life choices I made that weren't considered to be 'black' choices. For example, joining the swim team when it is a known fact that 'black folk don't swim'; or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken.
Issa Rae
#10. Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.
Richard Wright
#11. If the churches don't move, much of the community won't move. We've got a situation in which a black church is still a major institution in the black community where 55 percent of the black folk attend and over 75 pass through its doors.
Cornel West
#12. So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.
Cornel West
#13. They didn't have to describe Jesus to me for me to know he's black. Jesus' first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding. Now if that ain't black folk, I don't know what is.
D. L. Hughley
#14. There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.
Cornel West
#15. I'm black, so, you know, I'm again with black folk, but it's a love that spills over to vanilla suburbs and red reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices.
Cornel West
#16. Yeah, Chase. I have a cow under my bed. It's invisible, though, so you can't see it. But sometimes at night it comes out to play. What the hell is wrong with your brain?
Rachel Van Dyken
#17. I always just wanted to have enough to carry on. I never had ambitions to take over the world or be a global enterprise. But I wanted to have a strong business in order to do the main objective.
Rei Kawakubo
#18. The greatest legacy one can pass on to one's children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one's life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.
Billy Graham
#20. Survival isn't lying down and saying, oh, poor me. It's finding ways to live and keep your light shining in the midst of the darkest circumstances.
Danai Gurira
#21. I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song.
Frank Black
#22. Lords and ladies who walk unseen, lords and ladies all in green, three times I stamp upon the earth..." Hazel hesitated and then gave the only reason she could think of why the Folk might grant her entry to their revel."Let me in for the sake of mirth.
Holly Black
#23. Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?
Geraldine Brooks
#24. If a group of people - leaders - can convince a group of folk who barely have a pot to piss in that the rich shouldn't be taxed
THAT is leadership!
Lewis Black
#26. And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn't the courage to express
Wilhelm Reich
#27. It is extremely difficult for our contemporaries to conceive of the conditions of free banking because they take government interference with banking for granted and as necessary.
Ludwig Von Mises
#28. The word photography comes from two ancient Greek words: photo for "light" and graph for "drawing." "Drawing with light" is a way of describing photography.
Vishal Diwan
#29. Cockroaches were a problem, too, and to me the people who invented Combat, the little black roach-trapping contraption, are urban folk heroes.
Kim Gordon
#30. The girl-next-door image is a sort of joke; for years, I couldn't get any roles other than as somebody dark.
Felicity Kendal
#31. Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? You're black and living in the South
did you forget how to lie?
Ralph Ellison
#32. There's a monster in our wood. She'll get you if you're not good. Drag you under leaves and sticks. Punish you for all your tricks. Anest of hair and gnawed bone. You are never, ever coming ... home.
Holly Black
#33. Most of life seems to be finding that line between one extreme and another and walking it. This is called judgement. Too many folk try to avoid it by claiming every issue is black or white.
Michael Laird
#34. I listen to music mostly in the evening. I've come to love what is called world music, like the Zimbabwean Oliver Mtukudzi and the Colombian singer Marta Gomez. I also love the Irish folk singer Mary Black. Other favorites include Chet Baker, Eva Cassidy, and Billie Holiday.
Jeannette Walls
#35. Where weary folk toil, black with smoke, And hear but whistles scream, I went, all fresh from dawn and dew To carry them a dream. I went to bitter lanes and dark, Who once had known the sky, To carry them a dream-and found They had more dreams than I.
Mary Carolyn Davies
#37. The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a "them" problem, we become another problem.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#38. A reprisal of this magnitude ... has never been carried out before. I paced back and forth in my room perplexed and completely depressed, feeling helpless.
Moshe Sharett
#39. Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born.
Ketch Secor
#40. The human body has limitations; the human spirit is boundless.
Dean Karnazes
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