LANGSTON HUGHES

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

It's such a Bore Being always Poor.

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow.

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

I will not take 'but' for an answer.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith sinking Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.

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

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.

I swear to the Lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slaver's scars, I am the Red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same ole stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.

I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than the mayor of any town in Georgia.

Let us all work for the nation that is yet to be but which yet must be.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore .... Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

The South opposes the civil rights of Negroes and their protection by law. Witness lynchings where no one is punished, witness the Jim Crow laws that deny the letter and spirit of the Constitution. For democracy to have real meaning, the Negro must have the same civil rights as any other American citizen. It seems obvious that the South does not yet know what this war is all about

Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people's problems were worse than ours.

I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.