Lorraine Hansberry

I have long since passed that period when I felt personal discomfort at the sight of an ill-dressed or illiterate Negro. Social awareness has taught me where to lay the blame.

I feel that women - without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero - indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race.

It is difficult for the American mind to adjust to the realization that the Rhetts and the Scarletts were as much monsters as the keepers of Buchenwald-they just dressed more attractively.

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.

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.

Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time.

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.

Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.

There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.

The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it this which threatens existence.

The whole realm of morality and ethics is something that has escaped the attention of women, by and large. And it needs the attention of intellectual women most desperately.

A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men - and people in general.

Take away the violence and who will hear the man of peace?

Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually -- without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts? This is what I puzzle about.

Obviously the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women

Children see things very well sometimes and idealists even better.

Beneatha: You didn't tell us what Alaiyo means... for all I know, you might be calling me Little Idiot or something... ... Asagai: It means... it means One for Whom Bread--Food--Is Not Enough.

I'm just tired of hearing about God all the time. What has He got to do with anything?... I'm not going to be immoral or commit crimes because I don't believe. I don't even think about that. I just get so tired of Him getting the credit for things the human race achieves through its own effort. Now, there simply is no God. There's only man. And it's he who makes miracles.