George Edward Woodberry Quotes

A race is genetically coherent, a race is something you can study, a race is about genes and DNA, but it’s not just about genes and DNA. The most important thing about it is the people and the spirit. That’s what a race is about.

I am a black man inside and outside and you are white men on the outside, but inside, you are Africans like me.

You didn't know whether Chuck Berry was black or white - it was not a concern.

No one will treat with indifference the principle of race. It is the key of history.

What is it to be white? It does mean something to be Norwegian. It means something to be Polish or German or Spanish. But 'white' is simply a catchall for 'light-skinned person.' It doesn't really mean anything.

I've been told there's a special golden shelf, in the secret vault kept at the back of every bookstore in America, that contains the Bible, 'War and Peace,' and 'Driving Mr. Albert.'

What disturbs or assures us about race has very little to do with blood or biology. Race is about how you use language, understand your heritage, interpret your history, identify with your kin, figure out what your meaning and worth to a society that places values on you beyond your control. And it's also about what people see you as - or take you to be.

Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography.

The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul--BOOKS.

I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.

All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.

...I cannot help being astonished at the furious and ungoverned execration which all reference to the possibility of a fusion of the races draws down upon those who suggest it, because nobody pretends to deny that, throughout the South, a large proportion of the population is the offspring of white men and colored women.

Mankind are creatures of books, as well as of other circumstances; and such they eternally remain,--proofs, that the race is a noble and believing race, and capable of whatever books can stimulate.

Barack Obama's strategy is to get away from anything having to do with race as quickly as he can. His fear is that that might open a Pandora's Box.

Diversity worship and multiculturalism are currency and cause for celebration at just about any college. If one is black, brown, yellow or white, the prevailing thought is that he should take pride and celebrate that fact even though, just as in the case of my eye color, he had nothing to do with it. The multiculturist and diversity crowd see race as an achievement. In my book, race might be an achievement, worthy of considerable celebration, only if a person was born white and through his effort and diligence became black.

Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.

I'm for a multi-racial world in which each race keeps to itself, in harmony with the other races. Like in a garden, you have flowerbeds of roses and flowerbeds of carnations and irises and different other flowers. They don't intermarry. They stay separate, and each one has its beauty. . . . I'm against colonialism for the reason that colonialism infects the master as well as the slave. It even infects the master more.

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy ... it's sort of a mixed up thing. You just have to feel it.

That [race] is still part of what [Barack Obama] is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

[James] Baldwin was a revelation for me, the kind of revelation that follows you all your life because you can go back to it. It's not just about stories. It's about philosophy. It's about criticizing the world. It's about deconstructing the world around you.

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.