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"For if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle … - Lorraine Hansberry
"For if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up in his way, still imperfect and wobbly in his small view of human destiny, what I believe Arthur Miller once called "the golden threat of history." He becomes, in spite of those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes, but attacking the Oracle instead. He is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle at Warsaw; he is that young girl who swam into sharks to save a friend a few weeks ago; he is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all those things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that it is in his eyes."
English
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About Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry (19 May 1930 – 12 January 1965) was an American playwright.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry
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Additional quotes by Lorraine Hansberry
I will go home and much of what I will have to say will seem strange to the people of my village... But I will teach and work and things will happen, slowly and swiftly. At times it will seem that nothing changes at all... and then again... the sudden dramatic events which make history leap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred. But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and will not wonder long. And perhaps... perhaps I will be a great man... I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course... and perhaps for it I will be butchered in my bed some night by the servants of empire...
...perhaps the things I believe now for my country will be wrong and outmoded, and I will not understand and do terrible things to have things my way or merely to keep my power. Don't you see that there will be young men and women, not British soldiers then, but my own black countrymen... to step out of the shadows some evening and slit my then useless throat? Don't you see they have always been there... that they always will be. And that such a thing as my own death will be an advance? They who might kill me even... actually replenish me!
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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?
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