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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"Being the first person to go to college that really related to me from the movie [The Butler] because being black and going to college everyone puts so much hope into you."
"There's nothing worse, I guess, than being black in an all-white church or being southern and being a liberal."
"An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa."
"Black absorbs all color, accepts them, takes them into it and let them define it. Gray isn't anything but itself. It absorbs nothing but itself."
"Blacks are supposed to rejoice whenever our way of life becomes more mainstream. We seldom do. For we see in it a sanctioning that can only be granted by white society. In other words: If you're white, it's all right. If you're black, step back."
"The smith and his penny both are black."
"And all was black and still, and black and cold, and black and dead, and black."
"Black moleskin gloves covered his hands; the right because it was burned, the left because a man felt half a fool wearing only one glove."
"A bear! A bear! All black and brown and covered in hair!"
"I look into my own black heart."
"Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians."
"When I was older and I first started working, I was obsessed with buying my first Chanel jacket. I saved up my hard-earned money, went to Barneys, and bought a little black Chanel jacket. It saw many, many job interviews and many, many events. I'm not fitting into it lately, but I still have it."
"My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school."
"The main mineral in your cellphone, coltan [a black metallic ore], comes from the Eastern Congo. Multinational corporations are there exploiting the very rich mineral resources of the region. A lot of them are backing militias which are fighting one other to gain control of the resources or a piece of the resources."
"We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that."
"The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males."
"There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still."
"You can get it in any color, as long as it is black"
"Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."
"The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions."
