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Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.

Anna Julia Cooper

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Anna Julia Cooper
Age: 105 †
Born: 1858
Born: August 10
Died: 1964
Died: February 27
Educator
Historian
Political Theorist
Suffragist
Writer
Raleigh
North Carolina
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper
Anna Julia Cooper
Black woman of the South
Anna Julia Haywood
Speculation
Must
Something
Life
Dilettante
Dilettantes

More quotes by Anna Julia Cooper

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The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem.
Anna Julia Cooper
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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.
Anna Julia Cooper
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One needs occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God.
Anna Julia Cooper
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... the majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while that women aspire to higher education.... The three R's, a littlemusic and a good deal of dancing, a first rate dress-maker and a bottle of magnolia balm, are quite enough generally to render charming any woman possessed of tact and the capacity for worshipping masculinity.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Teach [our girls] that there is a race with special needs which they and only they can help that the world needs and is already asking for their trained, efficient forces.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.'
Anna Julia Cooper
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As in an icicle the agnostic abides alone. The vital principle is taken out of all endeavor for improving himself or bettering hisfellows. All hope in the grand possibilities of life are blasted.
Anna Julia Cooper
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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.
Anna Julia Cooper
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I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.
Anna Julia Cooper
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A race cannot be purified from without.
Anna Julia Cooper
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One of the most singular facts about the unwritten history of this country is the consummate ability with which Southern influence, Southern ideas and Southern ideals, have from the very beginning even up to the present day, dictated to and domineered over the brain and sinew of this nation.
Anna Julia Cooper
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It is the curse of minorities in this power-worshipping world that either from fear or from an uncertain policy of expedience they distrust their own standards and hesitate to give voice to their deeper convictions, submitting supinely to estimates and characterizations of themselves as handed down by a not unprejudiced dominant majority.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.
Anna Julia Cooper
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The impulse of humanity toward social progress is like the movement in the currents of a great water system, from myriad sources and under myriad circumstances and conditions, beating onward, ever onward toward its eternity, the Ocean.
Anna Julia Cooper
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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.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant what I fear it still means to some men in our own day - respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort.
Anna Julia Cooper
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No man can prophesy with another's parable.
Anna Julia Cooper
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The great, the fundamental need of any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice and there cannot be heroism, devotion, or sacrifice in a primarily skeptical spirit.
Anna Julia Cooper
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... so long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon with one face (the man's face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was disc or sphere.
Anna Julia Cooper