“I was an illegitimate, well, I still am an illegitimate child.”

I have to keep testing myself.

Even as a child, I found a way to survive.

I fight for other people better than I fight for myself.

In essence, I’m a sophisticated cotton picker.

I’m a dirt person. I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.

I see them in my audience all the time, with the fur coat, a woman whose hand is always out front, or the two fingers are on the cheek to show her diamond. I don’t have anything against that.

When the people who are responsible for our country ask you a direct question, I expect them to accept a direct answer, not to be blackballed because you are telling the truth.

My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself, afraid of what I think or of my opinions.

Aging has a wonderful beauty and we should have respect for that.

We’re not thought of in terms of color because we are entertainers. We are there to entertain you not because we are black, white, pink, or green or gay or straight or because we are Catholic or Protestant.

Relationships can be rather uncomfortable for her. But, as Eartha Kitt, it’s fine. I can accept and reject any time I want to. Do I ever reject? Not really. Although people think I do!

In the ’50s, critics used to say I had a ‘dangerous’ act.

I have a great need for affection from an audience. I don’t know whether this is because I had such a tough life when I was a child.

I was a street dancer.

Innocence is one of the most exciting things in the world.

Maybe subconsciously I feel I was meant to work hard for a living.

Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won’t feel like watching.

Time always seems long to the child who is waiting – for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day.

The only time my records are going to be broken is by my own spawn. I’m going be training that child out the womb.

Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.

I must take issue with the term ‘a mere child’, for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.

Maturity – among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.

If you are truly serious abut preparing your child for the future, don’t teach him to subtract teach him to deduct.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply… For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.