Lorraine Hansberry Quotes

...I am the first to say that ours is a complex and difficult country and some of our complexities are indeed grotesque. We who are Negro Americans can offer that last remark with unwavering insistence. It is, on the other hand, also a great nation with certain beautiful and indestructible traditions and potentials which can be seized by all of who possess imagination and love of man. There is, as a certain play suggests, a great deal to be fought in America - but, at the same time, there is so much which begs to be but re-affirmed and cherished with sweet defiance.

I always thought it was the one concrete thing in the world that a human being could do. Fix up the sick, you know — and make them whole again. This was truly being God...

Mama — Mama — I want so many things... I want so many things that they are driving me kind of crazy...

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 —

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.

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

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.

There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he's been through and what it done to him. 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. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so. 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.

RICE Why don’t some of you educated chaps talk sense into these murderers? What do they think they are going to accomplish? Murdering people who never did them a moment’s harm — and their own people to boot? We don’t pretend that it’s been all jolly on our side — but this business — what’s the good of it, boy? ’Tisn’t going to solve a bloody thing! And they can’t win, you know. Why don’t the fellows like you do something … talk to them?

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

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

It’s all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don’t accept. It’s not important. I am not going out and be immoral or commit crimes because I don’t believe in God. I don’t even think about it. It’s just that I get tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no blasted God — there is only man and it is he who makes miracles!

I think it’s very simple that the whole idea of debating whether or not Negroes should defend themselves is an insult.

Obviously, the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women, who are twice oppressed. So I imagine that they react accordingly: as oppression makes people more militant, women become twice militant, because they are twice oppressed.

MAMA: You must not dislike people ’cause they well off, honey.

BENEATHA: Why not? It makes just as much sense as disliking people ’cause they are poor, and lots of people do that.