Top 665 Colored Quotes & Sayings

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

Patience. I colored patience gray, hung over with black clouds. I colored hope yellow, just like the sun we could see for a few short morning hours. Too soon the sun rose high in the sky & disappeared from view, leaving us bereft and staring at blue.

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator's memories and thoughts.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' "I said: 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.

Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it.

We live inside too much. We live inside and we have square thoughts and square ideas because we live in square houses. Our lives are colored by our environments. Our attention fields are colored by it.

The bird Imagination, That flies so far, that dies so soon; Her wings are colored like the sun, Her breast is colored like the moon.

When I was growing up in rural Alabama, as a young child, about 50 miles from Montgomery, and we would visit the little town of Troy, or visit Montgomery or Tuskegee, I would see the signs that said, "WHITE MEN - COLORED MEN," "WHITE WOMEN - COLORED WOMEN."And I would come home and say to my mother and father and my grandparents, "Why?" "Why this?" "Why that?" And they would just tell me, "That's just the way it is! Don't get in the way. Don't cause trouble."

Reality itself is steadily becoming more colored. Think of what factories were like, especially in Italy at the beginning of the 19th century, when industrialization was just beginning: gray, brown and smoky. Color didn't exist. Today, instead, most everything is colored. The pipe running from the basement to the 12th floor is green because it carries steam. The one carrying electricity is red, and that with water is purple. Also, plastic colors have filled our homes, even revolutionized our taste. Pop art grew out of that and was possible because of this change in taste.

Susan Boggs, a black runaway interviewed in Canada in 1863, said of the religious slave masters: 'Why the man that baptized me had a colored woman tied up in his yard to whip when he got home that very Sunday and her mother . . . was in church hearing him preach. He preached, You must obey your masters and be good servants.- That is the greater part of the sermon, when they preach to the colored folks. . . .'

I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.

She would have colored gracefully with embarrassment had she not possessed the complexion of one of those “heathen Italians,” as her mother said, who never colored, gracefully or otherwise. (Convincing her mother that Christianity had, to all intents and purposes, originated with the Italians, thus making them the exact opposite of heathen, was a waste of time and breath.)

I was the first to wear colored skinny jeans.

All perception is colored by emotion.

There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know. But there were actually colored windows at the post office in, for example, Pensacola, Florida. And there were white and colored telephone booths in Oklahoma. And there were separate windows where white people and black people would go to get their license plates in Indianola, Mississippi. And there were even separate tellers to make your deposits at the First National Bank in Atlanta.

On the Avenue in front of the White House were several hundred colored people, mostly women and children, weeping and wailing their loss. This crowd did not diminish through the whole of that cold, wet day; they seemed not to know what was to by their fate since their great benefactor was dead, and though strong and brave men wept when I met them, the hopeless grief of those poor colored people affected me more than almost anything else.

We can never lose what is really ours. Who can lose his being? Who can lose his very existence? If I am good, it is the existence first, and then that becomes colored with the quality of goodness. If I am evil, it is the existence first, and that becomes colored with the quality of badness. That existence is first, last, and always; it is never lost but ever present.

I always wear colored prescription contacts for my looks.

The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling... How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?

Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles] It's me And who is the poet writing this poem? That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.

It is fitting that the Government of the United States should assume the obligation of the establishment and maintenance of a first-class university for the education of colored menand I wish to put in this caveatthat the colored race today, all of them, would be better off if they all had university education.... Of course, the basis of education of the colored people is in the primary schools and in industrial schools.... In those schools must be introduced teachers from such university institutions as this.

I learned to play the git-tar from an old colored man in the streets of Montgomery. He was named Tetot, and he played in a colored street band.

A war undertaken and brazenly carried on for the perpetual enslavement of colored men, calls logically and loudly for colored men to help suppress it.

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again." How It Feels to Be Colored Me

I am above eighty years old ... I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked.

Day-colored wine, night-colored wine, wine with purple feet or wine with topaz blood, wine, starry child of earth.

Paintings can make you cry and it's just **colored dirt**.

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.

In it not easy to remain rational and normal mentally in such a setting where, even in our airport in Montgomery, there is a white waiting room... There are restroom facilities for white ladies and colored women, white men and colored men. We stand outside after being served at the same ticket counter instead of sitting on the inside.

In Sumter and other counties [in South Carolina] the whites are resorting to intimidation and violence to prevent the colored people from organizing for the elections. The division there is still on the color line. Substantially all the whites are Democrats and all the colored people are Republicans. There is no political principle in dispute between them. The whites have the intelligence, the property, and the courage which make power. The negroes are for the most part ignorant, poor, and timid. My view is that the whites must be divided there before a better state of things will prevail.

Early on I saw the plastic quality in colored people and had friends among them; and later was to work from colored models and friends, including Paul Robeson, whose splendid head I worked from in New York. I tried to draw Chinamen in their quarter, but the Chinese did not like being drawn and would immediately disappear when they spotted me.

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

I had a very rainbow-colored childhood.

I don't think baseball owes colored people anything. I don't think colored people owe baseball anything, either.

I like Paris because I find something here, something of integrity, which I seem to have strangely lost in my own country. It is simplest of all to say that I like to live among people and surroundings where I am not always conscious of 'thou shall not.' I am colored and wish to be known as colored, but sometimes I have felt that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country. And so - but only temporarily - I have fled from it.

Imperialism has now reached a degree of almost scientific perfection. It uses White workers to conquer the non-white workers of The Colonies. Then, it hurls the non-white workers of one colony against those of another non-white colony. Finally, it relies on the Colored workers of the colonies to rule the White workers. Recently, White French soldiers near mutiny in the occupied Ruhr of Germany, were surrounded by French African soldiers, and colored native light-infantry were sent against White German strikers.

A white woman has only one handicap to overcome - that of sex. I have two - both sex and race. ... Colored men have only one - that of race. Colored women are the only group in this country who have two heavy handicaps to overcome, that of race as well as that of sex.

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.

A man's life is colored by the dye of his imagination.

But the real tragedy was that 15 hadn't been colored yet.

I have always tried...to lay before the colored race a cross section of it's own life, to view the colored heart from close range.

The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you've got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.

I like playing. Guitar... on a loud rock stage... with colored lights. Everything sounds better with colored lights!

Being classically trained gave me the real foundation for music. It's so important in my life. Why was I influenced by all these styles of music? Because it gave me a sense of freedom. It made me feel like I could put my hand in a colored bag and pull out a different colored candy and have fun with it.

I was given some designer colors for ink pens a long time ago and I haven't used them, and I have some handmade paper, and I just have the desire to drip on wet paper. It reminds me of when I was seven years old and had my tonsils out, and one of the first artworks I made was on toilet paper with a colored pencil; it was sort of half paint and half colored pencil. But I got very involved with color and absorption and I think, you know, 78 is a good time to go back to the beginning.

We're all colored, or you wouldn't be able to see anyone.

Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked 'Colored.' When I went to the movies, I would have to sit in the Colored balcony.

Spring comes: the flowers learn their colored shapes.

There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States. That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.

If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, 'Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty.' In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean.

I watched the early morning light pass over and through the windows of colored glass, leaving streaks of red and green and yellow on the stone floor. When I was little, I used to try and capture the colored light. I thought I could hold it in my hand and carry it home. Now I know it is like happiness-- it is there or it is not, you cannot hold it or keep it.

My heart is a colored pencil but my brain is an eraser

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.

The naturally colored products aren't as bright as the synthetically colored products, they're not as attractive to consumers. But, you know, it's the kind of thing that consumers simply would get used to very quickly.

Yellow-colored objects appear to be gold

... no young colored person in the United States today can truthfully offer as an excuse for lack of ambition or aspiration that members of his race have accomplished so little, he is discouraged from attempting anything himself. For there is scarcely a field of human endeavor which colored people have been allowed to enter in which there is not at least one worthy representative.

In the colored reflection we have Life.