Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
... 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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
... 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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
... 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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.
Anna Julia Cooper
Image
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.
Anna Julia Cooper
Image
A stream cannot rise higher than its source.
Anna Julia Cooper
Image
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
Image
A race cannot be purified from without.
Anna Julia Cooper
Image
Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.
Anna Julia Cooper
Image
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
Image
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