“Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro – and beautiful!”

I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

Cheap little rhymes A cheap little tune Are sometimes as dangerous As a sliver of the moon.

There’s a certain amount of traveling in a dream deferred.

The calm, Cool face of the river, Asked me for a kiss.

I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, Them thoughts would bust my head– So I don’t dare start thinking in the morning.

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who’s coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.

This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.

The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.

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.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables.

I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind- And I see that my own hands can make The world that’s in my mind.

Looks like what drives me crazy Don’t have no effect on you– But I’m gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too.

LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY! True anyhow no matter how many Liars use those words.

Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you – / Then, it will be true.

In the wrestle for victory, let us not forget that greatness comes with defeat.

Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.

The moment you accept yourself, you become beautiful.

Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.

Show a little faith there is magic in the night. You ain’t a beauty, but hey you’re alright, and that’s alright with me.

Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.