Lorraine Hansberry Quotes

"For above all, in behalf of an ailing world which sorely needs our defiance, may we, as Negroes or women, never accept the notion of - "our place.

CHARLIE Have you ever wondered — I am being devil’s advocate now — if just possibly he hadn’t “capitalized,” so to speak, on the backwardness he found here? MARTA (Tightly) Mr. Morris, I am not a very complicated person. I believe that people are what they do. You may think it simple-minded of me if you like — but if you don’t understand the depth of his sacrifice merely by being here —

Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in cigarette smoke?

[Beneatha Younger:]... He said everybody ought to learn how to sit down and hate each other with good Chrisitan fellowship.

[excerpt from Act II, Scene 3]

GEORGE : Oh, don’t be so proud of yourself, Bennie — just
because you look eccentric.
BENEATHA: How can something that’s natural be eccentric?
GEORGE: That’s what being eccentric means — being
natural. Get dressed.

I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality

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.

I’ll tell you right off, Matoseh, I know you are trying to decide: which kind am I? One of the obtuse ones who is sure to ask you all about rituals and lions? Or one of the top-heavy “little magazine” types who is going to engage a real live African intellectual in a discussion of “negritude” and Senghor’s poetry to show that I am — (He winks; TSHEMBE smiles back the least bit, warming) — really — “in.” Well, I am neither. I am a man who feels like talking.

In the twentieth century men everywhere like to breathe; and the Negro citizen still cannot, you see, breathe.

TSHEMBE (Whirling on him, words flying) And just why should we be able to “talk” so easily? What is this marvelous nonsense with you Americans? For a handshake, a grin, a cigarette and half a glass of whiskey you want three hundred years to disappear — and in five minutes!

"I want to fly! I want to touch the sun!"
"Finish your eggs first."

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 and generations.

Don't get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think.

And don’t call them terrorists: that’s for the settlers. Call them rebels, or revolutionaries. (Looking off with his own sad irony) Or fools. But never terrorists.

Cause sometimes it's hard to let the future begin!