I don't have any doubts that there will be a place for progressive white people in this country in the future. I think the paranoi...a common among white people is very unfounded. I have always organized my life so that I could focus on political work. That's all I want to do, and that's all that makes me happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I started out as a nurse I did so with the highest ideals.... But I found that steady work in my profession--like every woman...'s work in the world--depended upon the giving of myself.... Two-thirds of the physicians I met made a nurse's virtue the price of their influence in getting her steady work. Is it any wonder that I determined to become a member of this privileged sex, if possible?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When in the enfranchisement of the black men [women] saw another ignorant class of voters placed about their heads, and beheld the... danger of a distinctively "male" government, forever involving the nations of the earth in war and violence; and demanded for the protection of themselves and children, that woman's voice should be heard and her opinions in public affairs be expressed by the ballot, they were coolly told that the black man had earned the right to vote, that he had fought and bled and died for his country. It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exorbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is the same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust, and all who are now in the struggle from love of principle would still work on until the establishment of the grand and immutable truth, "All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At a tender age, I commandeered half a quire of foolscap from my father's desk and sat down to write a book. ...I had observed on ...printed fly leaves the words "By the author of, etc." ...So under the title of my prospective work I wrote: By the author of "Les Miserables," "The Woman in White," "Dombey and Son," "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Our Life in the Highlands," the last-named being an opus of good Queen Victoria. I had not read all these works but they existed on our bookshelves, and I hoped to produce something worthy of comparison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most profound effect of World War I on me ... was that it committed me to international affairs as the principal work of my li...fe. ...I have sometimes regretted that my avocation or chief hobby happened to be such a gloomy one. ...When I look at the world today ... I sometimes wonder whether [my efforts] were not nearly all in vain. Perhaps it would have been better if I had adopted as my chief hobby the cultivation of chrysanthemums or the breeding of West Highland White Terriers or even, as did one of my friends, the collection of Japanese swordguards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a peopl...e. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing ... then it will be done, but not until then.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My father was just and good to both white and colored, and as they dwelt and worked together I never heard or saw one cruel act pe...rpetrated. The workers were fed well, clothed well, and allowed, after their regular work, to earn wages, and thus the industrious lived most comfortably. There was not a trace of aggressiveness as there is now, but the people were jolly and always full of jokes and pranks. For instance, they had devious ways of procuring extra passes, without which they could not leave their masters' farms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Heaven has its business and earth has its business: those are two separate things. Heaven, that's the angels' pasture; they are ha...ppy; they don't have to fret about food and drink. And you can be sure that they have black angels to do the heavy work like laundering the clouds or sweeping the rain and cleaning the sun after a storm, while the white angels sing like nightingales all day long or blow in those little trumpets like they show in the pictures we see in church.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »