Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

You just don't want to push people into doing things that they really don't want to do. I don't think it's going to produce much.

I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been.

I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.

I decline to discuss, under compulsion, where I have sung, and who has sung my songs, and who else has sung with me, and the people I have known.

I am not a dumb animal to be browbeaten, cowed, lashed, coerced or goaded into anything I do not think is right.

The only reason I'm coming out here tomorrow is the schedule says I have to.

My father and brother always forced me to work out, and I never liked doing it.

Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self- sovereignty.

Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.

To yield to the threat or actual use of violence is a surrender of one's self respect and religious conviction.

I think the public doesn't understand that one of the reasons I haven't stood up for myself is because in order to do that, I have to stoop to a level that further humiliates other people.

It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.

Self respect is impossible without liberty.

Self-satisfaction and self-pity are both condemned. What are people permitted to feel about themselves?

Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.

People around the world just want self-respect. They want to take care of themselves, they want to pay for their own bills, they want to take care of their families.

Let us resist the opinion of the world fearlessly, provided only that our self-respect grows in proportion to our indifference.

Don't force me into saying what I don't want to say, and what I won't say.

You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.

You cannot borrow half of who you are from someone else, yet people try to do it all of the time, they just call it a relationship!

It is what it is but I do me and I think people respect that. They see me out in the hood by myself or with wifey and I don't have no bodyguards.

She took a step and didn't want to take any more, but she did.

In order to exist, man must rebel.