Art is an elastic sort of love.

Let us stop saying 'white Americans' and 'colored Americans,' let us try once and for all saying... Americans. Let human beings be equal on Earth as in Heaven.

I shall dance all my life. . . . I would like to die, breathless, spent, at the end of a dance.

Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.

Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

I spent 30 minutes each morning rubbing my body with half a lemon to lighten my skin.

I'm not intimidated by anyone. Everyone is made with two arms, two legs, a stomach and a head. Just think about that.