Lorraine Hansberry

“I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced and dissect and analyze them quite to pieces in a serious fashion. It is time that 'half the human race' had something to say about the nature of its existence.”

“I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality.”

“The why of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the how is what must command the living.”

“I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough - and I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.”

“The whole realm of morality and ethics is something that has escaped the attention of women, by and large. And it needs the attention of intellectual women most desperately.”

“I know he's rich. He knows he's rich, too.”

“I have long since passed that period when I felt personal discomfort at the sight of an ill-dressed or illiterate Negro. Social awareness has taught me where to lay the blame.”

“Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time.”

“The Murchisons are honest-to-God-real-foe-rich colored people, and the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich colored people. I though everybody knew that.”

“Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.”

“The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it this which threatens existence.”

“Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexuals think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.”

“There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.”

“You don't have to go to the kings and queens of the earth - I think the Greeks and Elizabethans did this because it was a logical concept - but every human being is in enormous conflict about something, even if it's how to get to work in the morning and all of that.”

“As of today, if I am asked abroad if I am a free citizen of the United States of America, I must only say what is true: No.”

“I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.”

“Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?”

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”

“MAMA: You must not dislike people ’cause they well off, honey.BENEATHA: Why not? It makes just as much sense as disliking people ’cause they are poor, and lots of people do that.”

“...I am the first to say that ours is a complex and difficult country and some of our complexities are indeed grotesque. We who are Negro Americans can offer that last remark with unwavering insistence. It is, on the other hand, also a great nation with certain beautiful and indestructible traditions and potentials which can be seized by all of who possess imagination and love of man. There is, as a certain play suggests, a great deal to be fought in America - but, at the same time, there is so much which begs to be but re-affirmed and cherished with sweet defiance.”