Paul Laurence Dunbar Quotes

Negro life in Washington is a promise rather than a fulfillment.

We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young anddodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

I think just in general there's a bunch of films that mattered to me that didn't reach their potential, and on some level you have to assume responsibility for that. And I think over the years that gets difficult.

The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.

The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

Childhood is a promise that is never kept.

I'm 47 years old, and I have to accept the fact that I'm probably not going to set the world on fire... If I was going to do that, I would have done it by now.

The Yardbirds sort of disbanded, and I was disappointed because I thought what we were doing was really good. I thought we were really onto something. I thought I was really onto something with these ideas that I had.

Many feel discouraged because they have not measured up to their potential.

I realized that with African American people, where we've been blocked from being all that God meant for us to be, I don't have time to be patient.

It's hard to tell what an entire series is going to be based on the first few episodes, or even on the first season. And it's sad because you see great casts and good ideas that don't get that opportunity to grow and show what it could turn into.

We've done a very poor job at really reflecting on our legacy of racial inequality... You see it in the South, but it's everywhere.

It sounds really bad but I never actually wanted to play.

The League of Nations could've been something really, really big... it wasn't. A lot of guys were frustrated about it in a way.

What's 'Atlanta' about? Technically, it's about a couple guys who are friends, but to me, 'Atlanta' is about black lives. I'm getting a real look at what black life means in Atlanta.

Balotelli, and a few others, have everything that I would have liked to have. It angers me that he does not use his talent to his full advantage.

I dreamed of turning pro as an Olympic medallist but I ended up turning pro as the kid who failed to make the Olympics.

Potential is like a summer crop. If it don't rain, it don't grow.

I think I've underachieved quite heavily.

Democracy has betrayed the race, because education has not served man as was expected.

How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.

I don't think we're getting the empathy, and identifying with the situations that many African Americans experience. That's the problem with how the story is being reported.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.