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If women were once permitted to read Sophocles and work with logarithms, or to nibble at any side of the apple of knowledge, there would be an end forever to their sewing on buttons and embroidering slippers.

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
Women
Apples
Embroidering
Work
Side
Sophocles
Would
Sides
Nibble
Education
Sewing
Forever
Slippers
Knowledge
Permitted
Read
Buttons
Ends
Apple

More quotes by Anna Julia Cooper

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I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.
Anna Julia Cooper
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... women are more quiet. They don't feel called to mount a barrel and harangue by the hour every time they imagine they have produced an idea.
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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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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All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs.
Anna Julia Cooper
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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.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.
Anna Julia Cooper
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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.
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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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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A stream cannot rise higher than its source.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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