“We must never forget that the dance is the cradle of Negro music.”

The younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses . . . Each generation . . . will have its creed.

Not by way of the forced and worn formula of Romaticism, but throught the closeness of an imagination that has never broken kinship with nature. Art must accept such gifts, and revaluate the giver.

All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage.

The Younger Generation comes, bringing its gifts. They are the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance. Youth speaks, and the voice of the New Negro is heard.

Art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

I wouldn’t give one iota to make a trip from the cradle to the grave unless I could live in a competitive world.

To my way of thinking, an actor’s course is set even before he’s out of the cradle.

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.