Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every bit as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of wh...ite supremacy are to the Negro.... this is no more a man's world than it is a white world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The colored woman feels that woman's cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian or ebony, i...s sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex and condition are seen as the accidents and not the substance of life ... [ellipsis in source] not till then is woman's lesson taught and woman's cause won--not the white woman's, nor the red woman's, but the cause of every man and every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman's wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with all undefended woe, and the acquirement of her "rights" will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral force of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ishmael's thought consciously extends itself to get behind the world of appearances; he wants to see and to understand everything.... Ahab's drive is to prove, not to discover; the world that tortures Ishmael by its horrid vacancy has tempted Ahab into thinking he can make it over. He seeks to dominate nature, to impose and inflict his will on the outside world--whether it be the crew that must jump to his orders or the great white whale that is essentially indifferent to him. As Ishmael is all rumination, so Ahab is all will. Both are thinkers, the difference being that Ishmael thinks as a bystander, has identified his own state with man's utter unimportance in nature. Ahab, by contrast, actively seeks the whale in order to assert man's supremacy over what swims before him as "the monomaniac incarnation" of a superior power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only the white, tremendous foam of the street has any importance, The new white flowers that are beginning to shoot up about ...now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Other men wear white suits in summer and it doesn't seem to bother them. But my white suit seems to be a little whiter than theirs.... I think also that it may have something written on the back of it, although I can't find it when I take the suit off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am so tired of taking to others translating my life for the deaf, the blind,... the "I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges to live it" white women the "I want to live my white life with Third World women's style and keep my skin class privileges" dykesLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... two great areas of deafness existed in the South: White Southerners had no ears to hear that which threatened their Dream. And... colored Southerners had none to hear that which could reduce their anger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... as a result of generations of betrayal, it's nearly impossible for Southern Negroes to trust a Southern white. No matter what ...he does or what he suffers, a white liberal is never established beyond suspicion in the hearts of the minority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »