Black quotes
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside black — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"You don't pick black actors or black directors because they are black. You pick them because they are good. If you lend somebody 50 million dollars you want you're money back. You don't care if they are oppressed. You just want you're money back."
"Its tall chimneys throw up black smoke, impregnating everything with soot, and the miners' faces as they traveled the streets were also imbued with that ancient melancholy of smoke, unifying everything with its grayish monotones, a perfect coupling with the gray mountain days."
"Before me no one would have dared dress in black"
"I'm not romanticizing black people, because we've got gangsters like everybody else."
"I believe in freedom for everyone, not just the black man."
"...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white."
"Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be."
"I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish."
"We're going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a heaven for black people -- especially black women. We've been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here."
"Saying women aren't funny is now like saying Asians can't drive or saying black people have bad credit. It's just really, like, so obsolete."
"I gather that a lot of the "pots" in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact."
"It's a waste of time to think that if you colored a painting red what might have happened if you painted it black."
"In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is."
"All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel - or if there was, it was an oncoming train."
"My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way."
"My signature style is super uniformed. I like black pants, black blazers, and boots."
"If I told you Jesus Christ was black you're going to be afraid of me because I'm telling you the truth. That's where I always come from."
"Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men, And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed."
"I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science."
"He pointed toward the silhouettes on the side of the [bathrooms] instead--black cutout man, black cutout woman. The man had his legs apart, the woman had hers together. Pretty much the story of the human race in sign language."
