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When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself

Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes
Age: 66 †
Born: 1901
Born: February 1
Died: 1967
Died: May 22
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Joplin
Missouri
James Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes
Firsts
First
Men
World
Starts
Build

More quotes by Langston Hughes

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They [the police] learned something from them Harlem riots. They used to beat your head right in public, but now they only beat it after they get you down to the station house.
Langston Hughes
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Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again!
Langston Hughes
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This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.
Langston Hughes
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Money and art are far apart.
Langston Hughes
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Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling.
Langston Hughes
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Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen!
Langston Hughes
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There is no color line in art.
Langston Hughes
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Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed - Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
Langston Hughes
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When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.
Langston Hughes
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Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it ... what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air, and you.
Langston Hughes
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Life is an egg you have to be patient and careful with it or it will break.
Langston Hughes
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I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.
Langston Hughes
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The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.
Langston Hughes
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Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.
Langston Hughes
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Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.
Langston Hughes
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I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind- And I see that my own hands can make The world that's in my mind.
Langston Hughes
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When I were a young man, I used to play baseball and steal bases just like Jackie Robinson. If the empire would rule me out, I would get mad and hit the empire.
Langston Hughes
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Good evening, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace.
Langston Hughes
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Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
Langston Hughes
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Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes