Toni Morrison Quotes

I'd rather not have to come face to face with predators. I'd rather not be harassed. But no. Those weren't my choices to make, were they?

A black man - I say a black man, we got no corner on the market, but every day in some form or fashion you got to prove you're a man. But you want to keep the life-and-death situations down. I can get beat. But there's getting beat and there's getting stomped.

I am not free because I can be exploded anytime.

Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.

Black, poor, without a father most of my life, one of 10 children - it was actually pretty amazing I had made it to the age of 29 without a noose around my neck.

Any time a negro community lives under fear that its churches are going to be bombed, then they have to realize they're living in a war zone.

Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses...

Are you looking for a Negro who won't fight back?

In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear.

White people deserve to be hit, deserve to be the victims of crime and acts of terror because they have for so long been the unfair, unjust, immoral majority throughout most of the nations that are imbued with Western civilization. If you think that’s an exaggeration, it isn’t. That is exactly how the Democrat Party of today and the American left looks at things.

An integral part of any relationship is knowing that you could be killed in your sleep at any time.

Martin Luther King was bumped off unjustly, Adam Clayton Powell was bumped off unjustly, they took my title unjustly, they killed Megers Ever unjustly, all the integrators who love white folks, was unjustly kicked out of Washington, they've been deprived of education and poverty throughout the country.

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

While there's life, there's fear.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

Perhaps life had a meaning that transcended race and colour. If it had, I could not find it in South Africa.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

Everybody's scared for their ass. There aren't too many people ready to die for racism. They'll kill for racism but they won't die for racism.

We live in a world where there are dangerous people, there are bad people.

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.

On the day when I was shot, all of my friends' faces were covered, except mine.

It's not anthrax or terrorism or AIDS that is the worst ill in our world: The most horrible disease in the world is hate.

We of Africa protest that, in this day and age, we should continue to be treated as lesser human beings than other races.

I cannot forget a conversation that I had with an elderly couple from the tribe. They asked me whether I would kill them after I had finished. When I asked them why they asked that, they replied, Because you white men always do!

Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.