Lillian Smith quotes
-
“Faith and doubt both are needed - not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve.”
-- Lillian SmithSource : Lillian Eugenia Smith (1954). “The journey”, World Publishing Company
-
“When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.”
-- Lillian Smith -
“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.”
-- Lillian SmithSource : "Killers of the Dream" by Lillian Smith, (pp. 25-26), 1994.
-
“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.”
-- Lillian Smith -
-
“The point of life is to find the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality.”
-- Lillian Smith -
“Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation.”
-- Lillian SmithSource : Acceptance speech for the Charles S. Johnson Award at Fisk University, 1966.
-
“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.”
-- Lillian SmithSource : Lillian Eugenia Smith (1954). “The journey”, World Publishing Company
-
“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?”
-- Lillian Smith -
-
“I broke every barrier I could to see things as they are.”
-- Lillian Smith -
“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.”
-- Lillian Smith -
“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.”
-- Lillian Smith -
“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?”
-- Lillian Smith -
-
“None but the weak crave to be better than. Strong men are satisfied with their own strength.”
-- Lillian Smith
You may also like:
-
Allen Tate
Poet -
Artie Shaw
Clarinetist -
Betty Smith
Author -
Carl Van Vechten
Writer -
Carson McCullers
Film writer -
Chester Himes
Writer -
Erskine Caldwell
Author -
John Egerton
Journalist -
John Oliver Killens
Fiction writer -
Kathleen Winsor
Author -
Lloyd C. Douglas
Author -
Pauli Murray
Activist -
Ralph McGill
Journalist -
Richard Wright
Author -
Robert Penn Warren
Poet -
Shelby Foote
Historian -
Walker Percy
Author -
William Goyen
Novelist -
Willie Morris
Writer