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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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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
Somebody
Tells
Lines
Unions
Stop
Police
Talking
Trade
Moon
Colonies
Begin
Colony
Poverty
Mention
Color
Poems

More quotes by Langston Hughes

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Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry-- I'll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die.
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Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.
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Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-
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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.
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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.
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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!
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I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long.
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A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be, Will share the bounties of the Earth And every man is free.
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Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism.
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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.
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To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.
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We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren?t it doesn?t matter.
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Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.
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Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
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Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.
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I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.
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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.
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Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling.
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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.
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Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
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