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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"I invented a camera that has an exposure time of one hundred years and the camera works in the simplest possible terms, because anything more complicated is more likely to break down in one way or another. It's a pinhole camera that lets in very low light and instead of exposing film, which is going to spoil within a matter of days or weeks, I'm using ordinary black paper."
"You never want to be the whitest-sounding black guy in a room."
"We're talking about America - a country that's been built on the back of cheap labor. That's addicted to cheap labor. Talk to the Chinese and Irish who built the railroads. Talk to the black people who built the South. So what is the US-Mexico conversation really about?"
"There's a more experimental album that follows that, which is like Black Magic and While You Were Sleeping. Then there's a return to jazz, For All We Know and Yesterday I Sang The Blues. It wasn't like a planned thing, I just kind of realized it when I made a list of my albums. Like, oh wow, this is exactly what I did before."
"I'm not a predictable black liberal."
"If you're a black kid, you're going to have hell in your life."
"Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist shirt"
"still, what could i say? that i didn't just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live?"
"We got a little rule back home: If it's brown, drink it down. If it's black, send it back."
"We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."
"Black women have not historically stood in the pulpit, but that doesn't undermine the fact that they built the churches and maintain the pulpits."
"It is imperative that young white men and women study the black American history. It is imperative that blacks and whites study the Asian American history."
"The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes."
"There is a kind of strength that is almost frightening in Black women. It's as if a steel rod runs right through the head down to the feet."
"I write because I am a Black woman, listening attentively to her people."
"Always in the black spirituals there's that promise that things are going to be better, by and by."
"It's one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say "Amen," maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be."
"Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they're African American they'll say, "I'm not black enough for African Americans. I'm not white enough for the whites. I'm not Hispanic enough.""
"We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it's] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture."
"What's happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures."
