Anna Julia Cooper

Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.

Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.

The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.

Nothing natural can be wholly unworthy.

Agnosticism has nothing to impart. Its sermons are the exhortations of one who convinces you he stands on nothing and urges you to stand there too.

Each is under the most sacred obligation not to squander the material committed to him, not to sap his strength in folly and vice, and to see at the least that he delivers a product worthy the labor and cost which have been expended on him.

One needs occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God.

I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.

A race cannot be purified from without.

If our vaunted rule of the people does not breed nobler men and women than monarchies have done it must and will inevitably give place to something better.

It is not the intelligent woman v. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman v. man. Nay, tis woman's strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice.

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class-it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.