Lorraine Hansberry Quotes

Never be afraid to sit a while and think.

Though it be a thrilling and marvellous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so - doubly dynamic - to be young, gifted and black.

I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.

One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and read of the miseries which affect the world.

There is always something left to love. And if you haven't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.

...Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non- violent.... They must harass, debate, petition, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps--and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.... The acceptance of our condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children [ellipses in source].

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men - and people in general.

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love.

I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and - I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations.

I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.

Obviously the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women

This is one of the glories of man, the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit: whenever life doesn't seem to give an answer, we create one.

The grim possibility is that she who 'hides her brains' will, more than likely, end up with a mate who is only equal to a woman with 'hidden brains' or none at all.

Sometimes, I can see the future stretched out in front of me - just as plain as day. The future hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me.

Once upon a time freedom used to be life-now it's money. I guess the world really do change.

Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.

A status not freely chosen or entered into by an individual or a group is necessarily one of oppression and the oppressed are by their nature (i.e., oppressed) forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition

Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning - because that ain't the time at all... When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.

Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually -- without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts? This is what I puzzle about.

There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.

That's what being eccentric means--being natural.

It isn't a circle--it is simply a long line--as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end--we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd by those who see the changes--who dream, who will not give up--are called idealists...and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"!

I'm just tired of hearing about God all the time. What has He got to do with anything?... I'm not going to be immoral or commit crimes because I don't believe. I don't even think about that. I just get so tired of Him getting the credit for things the human race achieves through its own effort. Now, there simply is no God. There's only man. And it's he who makes miracles.