“[at age eighty] My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I am free. I no longer have to be a “credit.” I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”
–Lena Horne, actress, singer, entertainer and activist
Posts tagged as “Inspiration”
“There is in this world no such force of a an determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.”
–W.E.B. DuBois, scholar, activist, writer, educator
“The constant reminder by society that I am ‘different’ because of the color of my skin, once I step outside of my door, is not my problem – it’s theirs. I have never made it my problem and never will. I will die for my right to be human – just human.”
–Cicely Tyson, actress and co-founder of the Dance Theatre Of Harlem
“I always say YCDA: you can do anything. If you want to be a successful actor, you have to believe in yourself more than anything else, and don’t let anybody tell you that you cannot do it because you can.”
–Michael Clarke Duncan, Academy Award-nominated actor
“There’s a great difference between being concerned and being committed. When you’re concerned, it’s negotiable. When I went to Washington, I was committed. And what I was about was not negotiable.”
— Jocelyn Elders, the first African-American U.S. Surgeon General
“Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but morning comes. Keep hope alive. Don’t you surrender! Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end faith will not disappoint.”–Jesse Jackson, civil and human rights activist
“I did my best and God did the rest.”
–Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American actor to win an Academy Award
GBN Quote Of The Day: “When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from his “I Have A Dream” speech
“I’m inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man.”
—President Barack Obama
GBN Quote Of The Day: “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.”
— Jackie “Moms” Mabley, actress and comedian