Anna Julia Cooper Quotes

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.

Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society.

Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.

Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.

The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.

A stream cannot rise higher than its source.

One needs occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God.

Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.

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.

I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.

Woman's cause is one and universal.

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

Nothing natural can be wholly unworthy.

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.

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.

No man can prophesy with another's parable.

A race cannot be purified from without.