Marian Anderson Quotes

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?

In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.

You can cage the songbird, but you can't make her sing. And you can trap the free bird, but you'll have to clip her wings.

But one day, the things that make you free start to keep you down.

I grew up with injustice and could do nothing about it. But once in America, I had freedom of choice.

There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.

I don't want to be limited or ghettoized in any way.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.

So long as you do not achieve social liberty, whatever freedom is provided by the law is of no avail to you.

American Negroes understand, far better than Soviet propagandists, that in the American system lies the hope for all submerged people who have the ability and determination to rise to the full status of free men.

The free, self-determining, self-developing soul may not walk its own path, however innocently, but must fit into the scheme and pattern …

Much depends upon us for the help of our color—more than many are aware. If we are lazy and idle, the enemies of freedom plead it as a cause why we ought not to be free … by such conduct we strengthen the hands of oppression and keep many in bondage …. I entreat you to consider the obligations we lie under ….

Whenever there are enclosing walls, there are abuses behind them.

The work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold onto the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own system of repression.

The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.

The negro, whom a million Americans died to free, is, in present bond and future promise still a slave, whipped by circumstance, trodden under foot by iron and ineradicable prejudice; shut out forever from the opportunities which are the heritage of liberty, and, holding in his black hand the hollow parchment of his franchise as a freeman, looks through a slave's eyes at the impassable barriers which imprison him forever within the progress and achievement of a dominant and all-conquering race.

All who abhor the immortality of discrimination and social injustice toward their fellow men must share the impatience of the nation’s Negro Americans and stand shoulder to shoulder with them in full active and affirmative support of their struggle to make a present reality out of the 100 year old Emancipation Proclamation.

If you are going to organize and ask for commitment, you cannot go to the most desperately poor. They are not likely to take action. If you stand on a man's head and push it into the dirt, he may not even see the heel of your boot. But if his whole face is already above ground, he can see your heel and he can see freedom ahead.

What did you expect? I don’t know why you’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.

Slavery was gone but its inequalities remained.

Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not develop or uplift those who win it. Freedom holds us accountable no matter the disadvantages we inherit from the past.