Racism Toni Morrison Quotes

#1. The bad jazz that a cat blows wails long after he's cut out.

Lord Buckley

#2. All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.

Herman Melville

#3. Love is the answer, that everyone seeks ... Love is the language, that every heart speaks.

Helen Steiner Rice

#4. Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon.

Toni Morrison

#5. Quality is everyone's responsibility.

W. Edwards Deming

#6. Long ago, before I met her, she twisted her blond hair into dreadlocks and, pretty as she is, the locks add an allure she wouldn't otherwise have.

Toni Morrison

#7. I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.

Toni Morrison

#8. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

Toni Morrison

#9. Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty ... A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.

Toni Morrison

#10. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

Toni Morrison

#11. There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race
scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct ... it has a social function, racism.

Toni Morrison

#12. A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe.

Toni Morrison

#13. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own.

Toni Morrison

#14. In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

Toni Morrison

#15. If you take racism away from certain people - I mean vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist - if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible - misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.

Toni Morrison

#16. If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.

Toni Morrison

#17. I'm not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing Americans doing.

Richard Holbrooke

#18. Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#19. It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

Robert D. Kaplan

#20. There's such a thing as too much happiness and sadness. What I'm after is contentment.

Ray Charles