“Every door of racial prejudice I can kick down, is one less door that my children have to kick down.”

When you’ve got something really good, you don’t have to force it on people. They will steal it!

I never thought I’d see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we were in Mississippi.

I wouldn’t mind paying taxes – if I knew they were going to a friendly country.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said: ‘that’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.

Just being a Negro doesn’t qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

Did you know that in New Orleans they still have brown bag parties? What’s that, you ask? You and I go to a party, and when we get to the door, there’s a brown bag hanging down from the ceiling, and if our skin is darker than the brown bag, we can’t go in.

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

There’s a God force inside of you that gives you a will to live.

If it wasn’t for Abe Lincoln, I’d still be on the open market.

It’s cool to be healthy.

People with high blood pressure, diabetes – those are conditions brought about by lifestyle. If you change the lifestyle, those conditions will leave.

You know, I always say white is not a color, white is an attitude, and if you haven’t got trillions of dollars in the bank that you don’t need, you can’t be white.

I’m not a comic. I’m a humorist.

When I go through the airport and see white women walking through the airport barefooted, like athlete’s feet don’t exist, there’s something wrong.

Home was a place to be only when all other places were closed.

There is a limit on how much information you can keep bottled up.

Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.

No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t.

All grown-ups were once children but only few of them remember it.

Only the children know what they are looking for.

God wants a child’s heart and a grownup’s head.

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

Is there anything more important than a child?

And I think that’s what life is all about, actually, about children and flowers.