Lillian Smith Quotes

Faith and doubt both are needed - not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve.

When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.

The point of life is to find the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality.

Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation.

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely.

The question in crisis or ordeal is not: Are you going to be an extremist? The question is: What kind of extremist are you going to be?

I broke every barrier I could to see things as they are.

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: It is the only way we can leave the future open.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Belief in Some One's right to punish you is the fate of all children in Judaic-Christian culture. But nowhere else, perhaps, have the rich seed-beds of Western homes found such a growing climate for guilt as is produced in the South by the combination of a warm moist evangelism and racial segregation.

For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into the masses. And where is the David who can slay this giant?

None but the weak crave to be better than. Strong men are satisfied with their own strength.

Man, born of woman, has found it a hard thing to forgive her for giving him birth. The patriarchal protest against the ancient matriarch has borne strange fruit through the years.