Best 14 quotes of Lillian Smith on MyQuotes

Belief in Some One's right to punish you is the fate of all children in Judaic-Christian culture. But nowhere else, perhaps, have the rich seed-beds of Western homes found such a growing climate for guilt as is produced in the South by the combination of a warm moist evangelism and racial segregation.

Faith and doubt both are needed - not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve.

For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into the masses. And where is the David who can slay this giant?

I broke every barrier I could to see things as they are.

None but the weak crave to be better than. Strong men are satisfied with their own strength.

Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation.

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

The point of life is to find the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality.

The question in crisis or ordeal is not: Are you going to be an extremist? The question is: What kind of extremist are you going to be?

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.

The human heart does not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it.