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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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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
Need
Fundamental
Great
Fundamentals
Needs
Sacrifice
Nation
Skeptical
Race
Heroism
Nations
Skepticism
Spirit
Primarily
Cannot
Devotion

More quotes by 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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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.
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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A stream cannot rise higher than its source.
Anna Julia Cooper
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Nothing natural can be wholly unworthy.
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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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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... 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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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 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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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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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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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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Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.
Anna Julia Cooper
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The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class - it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.
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.
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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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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Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.
Anna Julia Cooper