H through L

H

I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do.

Janet Campbell Hale (Coeur D'Alene Dacotah writer, 1946- )

If you were going to compete successfully in a white man's world, you had to learn to play the white man's game. It was not enough that an Indian be as good as; an Indian had to be better than.

Margaret Halsey (U.S. author and humorist, 1910-1997)

Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.

Fannie Lou Hamer (U.S. civil rights activist, 1917-1977)

When I liberate others, I liberate myself.

With the people, for the people, by the people, I crack up when I hear it; I say, with the handful, for the handful, by the handful, 'cause htat's what really happens.

Edith Hamilton (U.S. educator and writer, 1867-1963)

So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.

To be able to be caught up into the world of thought--that is to be educated.

Learned Hand (U.S. jurist, 1872-1961)

That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.

Lorraine Hansberry (U.S. playwright, 1930-1965)

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.

Frances Harper (U.S. abolitionist, 1825-1911)

My hands were weak, but I reached them out
To feebler ones than mine,
and over the shadow of my life
Stole the light of a peace divine.

Michael Harrington (U.S. writer and social critic, 1928-1989)

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

Hartmann von Aue (German poet, 1170-1215)

He who helps in the saving of others, saves himself as well.

William Hastie (U.S. judge, 1904-1976)

It is not a persuasive argument that an evil should continue because it has existed in the past.

William Hazlitt (English essayist, 1778-1830)

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.

Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.

Hebrew Proverbs

Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.

Do not judge your fellow man until you have stood in his place.

Teach your tongue to say, "I do not know."

The world exists on three things: truth, justice, and peace.

Ben Hecht (U.S. writer, 1894-1964)

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.

Lillian Hellman (U.S. playwright, 1905-1984)

No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

Reverend I. Carter Heyward (U.S. Episcopal priest and professor)

In the Spirit which draws us into honest engagement with one another, including those who may be very different from us in various ways, God calls us to wake up and learn how to love and respect one another, period.

If we are to live with our feet on the ground, in touch with reality, we must help one another accept the fact that we who are christian are heirs to a body-despising, woman-fearing, sexually repressive religious tradition. If we are to continue as members of the church, we must challenge and transform it at the root. What is required is more than simply a "reformation." I am speaking of revolutionary transformation. Nothing less will do.

Gilbert Highet (Scottish-born U.S. classical scholar and writer, 1906-1987)

Wherever there are beginners and experts, old and young, there is some kind of learning going on, some kind of teaching. We are all pupils and we are all teachers.

Christopher Hill (English historian, 1912- )

Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege.

Etty Hillesum (Dutch lawyer and writer, Holocaust victim, 1914-1943)

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war.

A large group of us were crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives were the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. What distinguished each of us was only our inner attitude.

Every day I shall put my papers in order and every day I shall say farewell. And the real farewell, when it comes, will only be a small outward confirmation of what has been accomplished within me from day to day.

Chester Himes (U.S. writer, 1909-1984)

Our highest ambition is to be included in the stream of American life, to be permitted to "play the game" as any other American; and is opposed to anything that aids in the exclusion; the face may be Africa, but the heart has the beat of Wall Street.

Hindustani Proverb

The tree casts its shade upon all, even upon the woodcutter.

Eric Hoffer (U.S. longshoreman and philosopher, 1902- )

We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.

Eva Hoffman (Polish-born U.S. teacher and writer, 1945- )

While we allow the inhabitants of imaginary remote corners the authenticity of savages or sufferers, we rarely suppose them to possess the authenticity of complex, sophisticated perceptions.

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw poet, 1947- )

It has seemed so strange to me that the larger culture, with its own absence of spirit and lack of attachment for the land, respects these very things about Indian traditions, without adopting those respected ways themselves.

Holland Proverbs

To do nothing teaches evil.

Sweep in front of your own door before you look after your neighbor's.

Might is not right.

Virtue consists of action.

John Haynes Holmes (U.S. clergyman, 1879-1964)

If Christians were Christians, there would be no anti-Semitism. Jesus was a Jew. There is nothing that the ordinary Christian so dislikes to remember as this awkward historical fact.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (U.S. jurist, 1841-1935)

The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.

The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

bell hooks (U.S. educator and writer, 1952- )

Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.

All of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions--and society--so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom.

Benjamin Hooks (U.S. civil rights activist, 1925- )

We're no longer arguing about riding in the back of the bus, but being the bus driver or the president of the bus company. We're not pushing for the right to buy the hot dog, but selling the hot dog and the right to own the hot dog franchise.

Paul Houston

The single largest variable that predicts SAT scores is family income. If you want higher SAT scores, you need to get your kids born into wealthier families. You know, it's great to tell kids to pull themselves up by their own boot straps, but you better put boots on them first.

Hsun-tzu (Chinese philosopher, 298-238 B.C.)

Men of all social stations live together: they are equal in their desires, yet vary in their methods; they are equal in their passions, yet different in their intelligence; that is their nature-given vitality.

Elbert Hubbard (U.S. writer, editor, and teacher, 1856-1915)

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before.

Hu Shih (Chinese writer, 1891-1962)

The underlying sickness of human life is an unwillingness to look with open eyes at the condition of the world.

Charles Evans Hughes (U.S. justice, 1862-1948)

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

Langston Hughes (U.S. poet, 1902-1967)

There is no color line in death.

I swear to the lord
I still can't see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

I am the American heartbreak--
The rock on which Freedom
Stumped its toe.

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

Elbert Hubbard (U.S. businessman and writer, 1856-1915)

Human service is the highest form of self-interest for the person who serves.

The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before.

Victor Hugo (French poet and essayist, 1802-1885)

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Kristin Hunter (U.S. writer, 1931- )

When you get up in the morning, you merely put on your clothes. When a colored man gets up in the morning, he puts on his armor.

Zora Neale Hurston (U.S. writer, 1903-1960)

Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can they deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.

A great state is a well-blended mash of something of all the people and all of none of the people. The liquor of statecraft is distilled from the mash you got.

We must learn to be honest with ourselves, and know our shortcomings. We will acquire cohesion but we will pay dearly for being a slow pupil.

Robert Maynard Hutchins (U.S. educator and university president, 1899-1977)

Equality and justice, the two great distinguishing characteristics of democracy, follow inevitably from the conception of men, all men, as rational and spiritual beings.

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Aldous Huxley (English novelist, 1894-1963)

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Experience is not what happens to you--it's how you interpret what happens to you.

I

A man's behavior is the index of the man, and his discourse is the index of his understanding.

Iceland Proverbs

A story is only half told if there is only one side presented.

Indian Proverbs

It is better to be blind than to see things from only one point of view.

Justice is better than admiration.

Indonesian Proverbs

Different fields, different grasshoppers; different seas, different fish.

Robert Green Ingersoll (U.S. lawyer and writer, 1833-1899)

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart--the best brain.

The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.

Irish Proverbs

There is not strength without unity.

J

Never look down on anybody unless you're helping them up.

When blacks are unemployed, they are considered lazy and apathetic. When whites are unemployed, it's considered a depression.

I hear that melting pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted.

His foreparents came to America in immigrant ships. My foreparents came to America in slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we are both in the same boat tonight.

Clive James (Austrian journalist, 1939- )

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

William James (U.S. philosopher and teacher, 1842-1910)

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Elizabeth Janeway (U.S. author and critic, 1913- )

Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.

Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spanish poet, 1881-1958)

A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.

James Weldon Johnson (U.S. poet, 1871-1938)

This country can have no more democracy than it accords and guarantees to the humblest and weakest citizen.

The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.

Mordecai W. Johnson (U.S. president of Howard University, 1890-1976)

The time is past when Christians in America can take a long spoon and hand the gospel to the black man out the back door.

Mordecai W. Johnson (U.S. president of Howard University, 1890-1976)

The time is past when Christians in America can take a long spoon and hand the gospel to the black man out the back door.

Sonia Johnson (U.S. author and activist, 1936- )

It's funny how heterosexuals have lives and the rest of us have "lifestyles."

LeeRoi Jones (U.S. writer and civil rights activist, 1934- )

A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.

Barbara Jordan (U.S. Congresswoman, 1936- )

"We the people"; it is a very eloquent beginning. But when the Constitution of the United States was completed on the seventeenth of September, 1787, I was not included in the "We the people." I felt for many years that somehow George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake.

June Jordan (U.S. poet, journalist, activist, 1937- )

If we even tolerate any oppression of gay and lesbian Americans, if we join those who would intrude upon the choices of our hearts, then who among us shall be free?

Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.

Chief Joseph (Nez Percé chief, c. 1840-1904)

Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and broken promises.

All men were made brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born free should be content when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.

Suppose a white man should come to me and say, "Joseph, I like your horses. I want to buy them." I say to him, "No, my horses suit me; I will not sell them." Then he goes to my neighbor and says to him, "Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell." My neighbor answers, "Pay me the money and I will sell you Joseph's horses." The white man returns to me and says, "Joseph, I have bought your horses and you must let me have them." If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way they bought them.

You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.

The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.

Let me be a free man--free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself--and I will obey your laws, or submit to the penalty.

We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit. We do not want to learn that.

Joseph Joubert (French essayist, 1754-1824)

To teach is to learn twice over.

Laure Junot (French writer, 1784-1838)

Prejudice squints when it looks and lies when it talks.

K

Children need models rather than critics.

Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.

K'ang Yu-wei (Chinese political philosopher, 1858-1927)

If we bring about that women seek to gain the rights of independence, to increase their sphere of responsibilities, and to incline toward studies, then human abilities will increase daily.

Helen Keller (U.S. essayist, 1880-1968)

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all--the apathy of human beings.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Thomas à Kempis (German religious writer, 1379-1471)

Have therefore zeal to better thyself and then mayst thou have zeal to thy neighbor.

We feel and weigh soon enough what we suffer from others: but how much others suffer from us, of this we take no heed.

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.

John F. Kennedy (U.S. president, 1917-1963)

In America there must be only citizens, not divided by grade, first and second, but citizens, east, west, north, and south.

If a free society cannot help the many that are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

We shall be judged more by what we do at home than what we preach abroad.

The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.

Our privileges can be no greater than our obligations. The protection of our rights can endure no longer than the performance of our responsibilities.

If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

No one has been barred on account of his race from fighting or dying for America--there are no "white" or "colored" signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.

The war against hunger is truly mankind's war of liberation.

Robert F. Kennedy (U.S. politician, 1925-1968)

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Debra Kent (U.S. writer, 1948- )

Though people with disabilities have become more vocal in recent years, we still constitute a very small minority. Yet the Beautiful People - the slender, fair and perfect ones - form a minority that may be even smaller.

Kenyan Proverbs

Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.

Kermit the Frog (Muppet)

It's not that easy being green.

Otto Kerner, Jr. (U.S. judge, 1908-1976)

Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.

Mohammed Khair-Eddine (Moroccan writer, 1941- )

I have lived in the redness of the stones that mark a path through my blood; I am the descendant of a forgotten race, but I carry in my hands the remnants of their fire.

John Oliver Killens (U.S. novelist and writer, 1916- )

Most of us came here in chains and most of you came here to escape your chains. Your freedom was our slavery, and therein lies the bitter difference in the way we look at life.

My fight is not for racial sameness but for racial equality and against racial prejudice and discrimination.

We have to undo the millions of little white lies that America told itself and the world about the American Black man.

We are not fighting for the right to be like you. We respect ourselves too much for that. When we advocate freedom, we mean freedom for us to be black, or brown, and you to be white, and yet live together in a free and equal society. This is the only way that integration can bring dignity for both of us.

What a tiresome place America would be if freedom meant we all had to think alike or be the same color or wear the same gray flannel suit! That road leads to the conformity of the graveyard!

The Negro loves America enough to criticize her fundamentally. Most white Americans simply can't be bothered.

Along with the fight to desegregate schools, we must desegregate the entire cultural statement of America, we must desegregate the minds of the American people or we will find that we have won the battle and lost the war.

Western man wrote "his" history as if it were the history of the entire human race.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (U.S. clergyman and civil rights leader, 1929-1968)

We shall not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

America must begin the struggle for democracy at home. The advocacy of free elections in Europe by American officials is hypocrisy when free elections are not held in great sections of America.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps perpetrate it.

We must learn together as brothers or perish together as fools.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.

The ultimate measure of man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false, and the false with the true.

A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.

We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.

All life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice that make philanthropy necessary.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountaintop. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land.

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers and sisters.

Maxine Hong Kingston (U.S. writer, 1940- )

Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Kiosaton (Iroquois chief)

There is no evil in my heart. My song is the song of peace.

Rudyard Kipling (Indian-born British author, 1865-1936)

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

Vicesimus Knox (British essayist, 1752-1821)

Can anything be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting temptation?

Jonathan Kozol (U.S. teacher and author, 1936- )

More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

Karl Kraus (Austrian editor and writer, 1874-1936)

There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.

L

Beware, as long as you live, of judging people by appearances.

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld (French writer, 1613-1680)

The world more often rewards the appearances of merit than merit itself.

Suzanne LaFollette (U.S. feminist and writer, 1893-1983)

The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured.

Most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations about the proper application of the word "human."

Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.

Dilys Laing (Canadian poet and playwright, 1906-1960)

To be a woman and a writer
is double mischief, for
the world will slight her
who slights "the servile house," and who would rather
make odes than beds.

Ronnie D. Laing (Scottish psychiatrist, 1927-1989)

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

There is no such "condition" as "schizophrenia," but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

Walter Savage Landor (English writer, 1775-1864)

There is no more certain sign of a narrow mind, of stupidity, and of arrogance, than to stand aloof from those who think differently from us.

Lao-Tzu (Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism, c. 604-531 B.C.)

He who knows others is learned; he who knows himself is wise.

He who is able to conquer others is powerful; he who is able to conquer himself is more powerful.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

Bart Laws

The Latino people of the Southwest are not immigrants. They never crossed the border--the border crossed them when the United States seized what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and California from Mexico in a war of conquest. Through a more complicated chain of events, Texas also became part of the U.S. by conquest, after being part of Mexico. So many illegal immigrants from Mexico are just visiting their family members. To Chicanos, it is the Anglos who are "illegal."

Max Lerner (Russian-born American teacher, 1902-1992)

In the end, as any successful teacher will tell you, you can only teach the things that you are. If we practice racism then it is racism we teach.

Doris Lessing (Rhodesian writer, 1919- )

When old settlers say 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.' They are saying in effect, 'Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don't want you.'

When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

Primo Levi (Italian novelist, 1919-1987)

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often loses himself.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim (Malaysian-born U.S. poet, 1944- )

As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.

Abraham Lincoln (16th U.S. President, 1809-1865)

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Robert Lindner (U.S. psychoanalyst, 1914-1956)

How protean are the devices available to human intelligence when it lends itself to the persistence of the conformist error.

Walter Lippmann (U.S. teacher and journalist, 1889-1974)

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

David Lloyd George (British Prime Minister, 1863-1945)

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.

Alain Locke (U.S. philosopher, 1886-1954)

All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage.

Belva Lockwood (U.S. lawyer and reformer, 1830-1917)

I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade--or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men, but wish we had more of it everywhere.

Anita Loos (U.S. novelist and screenwriter, 1893-1981)

I'm furious about the Women's Liberationists. They keep getting up on soap-boxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket.

Audre Lorde (U.S. poet, 1934-1992)

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

Your silence will not protect you.

Raising Black children--female and male--in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side.

James Russell Lowell (U.S. poet and critic, 1819-1891)

True freedom is to share / All the chains our brothers wear, / And, with heart and hand, to be / Earnest to make others free!

Clare Boothe Luce (U.S. diplomat and writer, 1903-1987)

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes.' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.'

I am for lifting everyone off the social bottom. In fact, I am for doing away with the social bottom altogether.

Albert John Luthuli (South African civil rights activist, 1898-1967)

To remain neutral, in a situation where the laws of the land virtually criticized God for having created men of color, was the sort of thing I could not, as a Christian, tolerate.

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