ANNA JULIA COOPER

Agnosticism has nothing to impart. Its sermons are the exhortations of one who convinces you he stands on nothing and urges you to stand there too.

Nothing natural can be wholly unworthy.

It is not the intelligent woman v. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman v. man. Nay, tis woman's strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice.

A race cannot be purified from without.

Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.

I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.

Each is under the most sacred obligation not to squander the material committed to him, not to sap his strength in folly and vice, and to see at the least that he delivers a product worthy the labor and cost which have been expended on him.

Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.

One needs occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God.

The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.

If our vaunted rule of the people does not breed nobler men and women than monarchies have done it must and will inevitably give place to something better.

I would beg ... to add my plea for the Colored Girls of the South:-- that large, bright, promising fatally beautiful class ... so full of promise and possibilities, yet so sure of destruction; often without a father to whom they dare apply the loving term, often without a stronger brother to espouse their cause and defend their honor with his life's blood; in the midst of pitfalls and snares, waylaid by the lower classes of white men, with no shelter, no protection.

Teach [our girls] that there is a race with special needs [Blacks] which they and only they can help; that the world needs and is already asking for their trained, efficient forces.

… women are more quiet. They don't feel called to mount a barrel and harangue by the hour every time they imagine they have produced an idea.

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class. It is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

... the majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while that women aspire to higher education.... The three R's, a littlemusic and a good deal of dancing, a first rate dress-maker and a bottle of magnolia balm, are quite enough generally to render charming any woman possessed of tact and the capacity for worshipping masculinity.

I care not for the theoretical symmetry and impregnable logic of your moral code, I care not for the hoary respectability and traditional mysticisms of your theological institutions, I care not for the beauty and solemnity of your rituals and religious ceremonies, I care not even for the reasonableness and unimpeachable fairness of your social ethics,--if it does not turn out better, nobler, truer, men and women,--if it does not add to the world's stock of valuable souls,--if it does not give us a sounder, healthier, more reliable product from this great factory of men--I will have none of it.

I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.

The great, the fundamental need of any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice; and there cannot be heroism, devotion, or sacrifice in a primarily skeptical spirit.

With five to ten hundred pure-minded young women threading the streets of the village every evening unattended, vice must slink away, like frost before the rising sun.

As in an icicle the agnostic abides alone. The vital principle is taken out of all endeavor for improving himself or bettering hisfellows. All hope in the grand possibilities of life are blasted.

Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.

The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem.

Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development - begun now and ending never. And a life made true cannot confine itself - it must reach out and twine around every pulsing interest within reach of its uplifting tendrils.

... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal "the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry]." He said he didn't know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate's coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.