“O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.”

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

It has seemed to me that most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

Road’s in front o’ me, Nothin’ to do but walk.

I’m so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself

Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

I dream a world… where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world!

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead.

As long as you are breathing there is time. Don’t rush time. Let it flow how it needs to.

Sometimes you need to get away to get a literal breath of fresh air physically & mentally.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

The air soft as that of Seville in April, and so fragrant that it was delicious to breathe it.

Breathing is so important with physical activity, then how much more important is it with psychological activity?

I like to let things breathe.

Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.