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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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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
Something
Society
Girl
Look
Wells
Appear
Well
Merely
Looks
Expect
Feel
Girls
Feels
Pretty

More quotes by Anna Julia Cooper

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Woman's cause is one and universal.
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With five to ten hundred pure-minded young women threading the streets of the village every evening unattended, vice must slink away, like frost before the rising sun.
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A race cannot be purified from without.
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Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Religion must be life made true and life is action, growth, development - begun now and ending never. And a life made true cannot confine itself - it must reach out and twine around every pulsing interest within reach of its uplifting tendrils.
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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.
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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.
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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 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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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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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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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 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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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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... religion (ought to be if it isn't) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true and life is action, growth, development--begun now and ending never.
Anna Julia Cooper