Church Terrell Quotes

#1. While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach.

Mary Church Terrell

#2. As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head

Mary Church Terrell

#3. A white woman has only one handicap to overcome - that of sex. I have two - both sex and race ... Colored men have only one - that of race. Colored women are the only group in this country who have two heavy handicaps to overcome, that of race as well as that of sex.

Mary Church Terrell

#4. Stop using the word 'Negro.' The word is a misnomer from every point of view. It does not represent a country or anything else ... I am an African-American.

Mary Church Terrell

#5. Nobody wants to know a colored woman's opinion about her own status of that of her group. When she dares express it, no matter how mild or tactful it may be, it is called 'propaganda,' or is labeled 'controversial.' Those two words have come to have a very ominous sound to me.

Mary Church Terrell

#6. The liberal party is a party which believes that, as new conditions an problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of the government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#7. I cannot help wondering sometimes what I might have become and might have done if I had lived in a country which had not circumscribed and handicapped me on account of my race, that had allowed me to reach any height I was able to attain.

Mary Church Terrell

#8. From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.

Charles Darwin

#9. I've never walked away from any of my positions. I take pride in them.

Nancy Pelosi

#10. Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

Mary Church Terrell

#11. It is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great ...

Mary Church Terrell

#12. Some people cannot bear the truth, no matter how tactfully it is told. No doubt the haughty, the tyrannical, the unmerciful, the impure and the fomentors of discord take a fierce exception to the Sermon on the Mount.

Mary Church Terrell

#13. Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.

H.L. Mencken

#14. Sandy: Boy, you must really think I'm stupid or something. Jeff: Ahh, no one would call you stupid, to your face.

Teri Garr

#15. Please stop using the word "Negro." ... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven variety of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really truly colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us.

Mary Church Terrell

#16. There's nothing in the world like live entertainment. With TV, you have to wait for your results; with live entertainment, people let you know right then and there. That relationship is established in 30 seconds. The first 30 seconds, they'll let you know whether they like you or not.

Tracy Morgan

#17. There are no secrets, there is no mystery. We make that all up. In fact, it's all right there in front of us. You have to have enough food to get through winter and spring. That's what it all comes down to. You have to live in a way that will gather enough food each fall to get through winter.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#18. To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.

Mary Church Terrell

#19. Before you were conceived, I wanted you. Before you were born, I loved you. Before you were an hour, I would die for you. This is the miracle of love.

Maureen Hawkins

#20. Ego and superego were dispatched with a single swift, killing blow and in swaggered my new ruler - that primitive little hedonistic bastard, the id.

Karen Marie Moning