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Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.

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
Years
Compromise
Democracy
Year
Fear
Today
Ever
Come

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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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Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.
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I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.
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Frosting Freedom Is just frosting On somebody else's Cake-- And so must be Till we Learn how to Bake.
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There's a certain amount of traveling in a dream deferred.
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Rest at pale evening... A tall slim tree... Night coming tenderly Black like me
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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.
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This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
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Because my mouth Is wide with laughter And my throat Is deep with song, You do not think I suffer after I have held my pain So long? Because my mouth Is wide with laughter You do not hear My inner cry? Because my feet Are gay with dancing You do not know I die?
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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.
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Negroes - Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind: Beware the day - They change their mind.
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As long as what is is-and Georgia is Georgia-I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.
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A dream deferred is a dream denied.
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Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language.
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Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.
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7 x 7 + love = An amount Infinitely above: 7 x 7 - love.
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What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Or does it explode?
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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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Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.
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One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.
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