Paul Robeson Quotes

As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen, I will always speak for peace, and no one can silence me in this. ~ Paul Robeson

To be free ... to walk the good American earth as equal citizens, to live without fear, to enjoy the fruits of our toil, to give our children every opportunity in life
that dream which we have held so long in our hearts is today the destiny that we hold in our hands. ~ Paul Robeson

I shall take my voice wherever there are those who want to hear the melody of freedom or the words that might inspire hope and courage in the face of fear. My weapons are peaceful, for it is only by peace that peace can be attained. The song of freedom must prevail. ~ Paul Robeson

I know that if the peace movement takes its message boldly to the Negro people a powerful force can be secured in pursuit of the greatest goal of all mankind. And the same is true of labor and the great democratic sections of our population. ~ Paul Robeson

Songs are dangerous, songs are subversive and can change your life. ~ Ronnie Gilbert

At every step the vast majority have expressed horror at the idea of an aggressive war. ~ Paul Robeson

And at home in the United States we found continued and increased persecution, first of leaders of the Communist Party, and then of all honest anti-fascists. ~ Paul Robeson

I found a special eagerness among the younger, and I am sorry to say, the more intelligent Negroes, to dismiss the spiritual as something beneath their new pride in their race. It is as if they wanted to put it behind them as something to be ashamed of ... ~ Paul Robeson

The patter of their feet as they walk through Jim Crow barriers to attend school is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua, and the world rocks beneath their tread. ~ Paul Robeson

Films make me into some cheap turn ... You bet they'll never let me play a part in a film where a Negro is on top. ~ Paul Robeson

If the American Negro is to have a culture of his own he will have to leave America to get it. ~ Paul Robeson

I've learned that my people are not the only ones oppressed ... I have sung my songs all over the world and everywhere found that some common bond makes the people of all lands take to Negro songs as their own. ~ Paul Robeson

This United States Government should go down to Mississippi and protect my people. That is what should happen. ~ Paul Robeson

Through the years I have received my share of recognition for efforts in the fields of sports, the arts, the struggle for full citizenship for the Negro people, labor's rights and the fight for peace. ~ Paul Robeson

In my music, my plays, my films, I want to carry always this central idea: to be African. ~ Paul Robeson

The course of history can be changed but not halted. ~ Paul Robeson

The Korean war has always been an unpopular war among the American people. ~ Paul Robeson

Sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause. ~ Paul Robeson

I learned that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa's material wealth. ~ Paul Robeson

The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic, but to end the injustice. ~ Paul Robeson

The talents of an artist, small or great, are God-given. They've nothing to do with the private person; they're nothing to be proud of. They're just a sacred trust ... Having been given, I must give. Man shall not live by bread alone, and what the farmer does I must do. I must feed the people - with my songs. ~ Paul Robeson

I asked her who he was and she said, "He was a man ahead of his time." She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys - any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about "the white devil" Mommy simply felt those references didn't apply to her. ~ James McBride

This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America ~ Paul Robeson

Art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be. ~ Paul Robeson

Coincidentally the couple who had endowed it had lived in her parents' building. They had had an eight-year-old with a pretty singing voice who drowned at a Maine summer camp. "You can't imagine what happened," said Sarah, but of course Rebecca could imagine. Being a boy soprano had a shorter shelf life than being a supermodel. She could almost see it as Sarah went on and on, the boy with the pale blue eyes, insensible to the hormones coursing through his body as he stood on the stage at Alice Tully Hall. Apparently his choir director had chosen "Old Man River," sung not in the bass range made famous by Paul Robeson, or in the dialect in which it had been written, but in a high register with crisp consonants. (To be fair to the choir director, he had never ~ Anna Quindlen

We [must] realize that our future lies chiefly in our own hands. ~ Paul Robeson

This is our home and this is our country. Beneath its soil lie bones of our fathers; for it some of them fought, bled, and died. Here we were born and here we will stay. ~ Paul Robeson

Furthermore, some of the best people in the country were connected with the Communist movement in some way, heroes and heroines one could admire. There was Paul Robeson, the fabulous singer-actor-athlete whose magnificent voice could fill Madison Square Garden, crying out against racial injustice, against fascism. And literary figures (weren't Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. DuBois Communists?), ~ Howard Zinn

I did a long concert tour in England and Denmark and Sweden, and I also sang for the Soviet people, one of the finest musical audiences in the world. ~ Paul Robeson

The talents of an artist, small or large, are God-given ... They are a sacred trust. ~ Paul Robeson

We ask for nothing that is not right, and herein lies the great power of our demand. ~ Paul Robeson

Four hundred million in India, and millions everywhere, have told you, precisely, that the colored people are not going to die for anybody: they are going to die for their independence. ~ Paul Robeson

In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being. ~ Paul Robeson

I am truly happy that I am able to travel from time to time to the USSR the country I love above all. I always have been, I am now and will always be a loyal friend of the Soviet Union. ~ Paul Robeson

In the early days of my carer as an actor, I shared what was then the prevailing attitude of Negro performers :;that the content and form of a play or a film scenario was of little importance to us. What mattered was was the opportunity, which came so seldom to our folks ... Later I came to understand that the Negro artist could not view the matter simply in terms of of his individual interests, and that he had a responsibility to his people who rightfully resented the traditional stereotyped portrayals of Negros on stage and screen. ~ Paul Robeson

Freedom is a hard-bought thing. ~ Paul Robeson

My father was a slave and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. ~ Paul Robeson

Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. ~ Paul Robeson

Through my singing and acting and speaking, I want to make freedom ring. Maybe I can touch people's hearts better than I can their minds, with the common struggle of the common man. ~ Paul Robeson

Get them to sing your song and they will want to know who you are. ~ Paul Robeson

Vast quantities of U.S. bombers, tanks and guns have been sent against Ho Chi Minh and his freedom-fighters; and now we are told that soon it will be 'advisable' to send America GI's into Indo-China in order that the tin, rubber and tungsten of Southeast Asia be kept by the "free world"-meaning white Imperialism . ~ Paul Robeson

The faces and the tactics of the leaders may change every four years, or two, or one, but the people go on forever. The people- beaten down today, yet rising tomorrow; losing the road one minute but finding it the next; their eyes always fixed on a star of true brotherhood, equality and dignity- the people are the real guardians of our hopes and dreams. ~ Paul Robeson

You know I am an actor, and I have medals for diction. ~ Paul Robeson

My mother was born in your state, Mr. Walter, and my mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington's troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave. ~ Paul Robeson

The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. ~ Paul Robeson

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too. ~ Paul Robeson

My future depends mostly upon myself. ~ Paul Robeson

But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people. ~ Paul Robeson

The intolerance of the few, or the risk of it, carries the day against the wider humanity of the many. ~ Paul Robeson

In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, back through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin - the shapers of humanity's richest present and future. ~ Paul Robeson

After all, Paul Robeson said, 'Artists are the radical voice of civilization.' Each and every one of you in this room, with your gifts and your power and your skills, could perhaps change the way in which our global humanity mistrusts itself. Perhaps we as artists and as visionaries, for what's better in the human heart and the human soul, could influence citizens everywhere in the world to see the better side of who and what we are as a species. ~ Harry Belafonte

We must join with the tens of millions all over the world who see in peace our most sacred responsibility. ~ Paul Robeson

I said it was my feeling that the American people would struggle for peace, and that has since been underscored by the President of these United States. ~ Paul Robeson

Freedom is a hard-bought thing and millions are in chains, but they strain toward the new day drawing near. ~ Paul Robeson

Why should the Negroes ever fight against the only nations of the world where racial discrimination is prohibited, and where the people can live freely? Never! I can assure you, they will never fight against either the Soviet Union or the peoples' democracies. ~ Paul Robeson

Americans will be amazed to find ho many of the modern dance steps are relics of the African heritage. ~ Paul Robeson

If you are to shape your world in following Christ, you are called, prayerfully, to discern where in your discipline the human project is showing signs of exile and humbly and boldly to act symbolically in ways that declare that the powers have been defeated, that the kingdom has come in Jesus the Jewish Messiah, that the new way of being human has been unveiled, and to be prepared to tell the story that explains what these symbols are all about. And in all this you are to declare, in symbol and practice, in story and articulate answers to questions, that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and Marx, Freud and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and neither modernity nor postmodernity is. When Paul spoke of the gospel, he was not talking primarily about a system of salvation but about the announcement, in symbol and word, that Jesus is the true Lord of the world, the true light of the world. ~ N. T. Wright

I love a good laugh as well, I think that's so important in life, which is probably why I've dabbled in comedy writing as well as horror. I think if you can make someone laugh or smile it's the most special thing in the world. ~ Paul Kane

If you keep at it long enough, one day you may witness some greater disturbance, some rushing breach of the water's surface so startling and violent and exhilarating that you too will suddenly, and always thereafter, believe in monsters. ~ Paul Schullery

This book is dedicated to the people of America
strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched. ~ Paul Johnson

Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead. ~ Jonathan Tropper

No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see. ~ Paul Strand

Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell! ~ Paul LePage

The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches. ~ Daniel Kahneman

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. ~ Paul Cezanne

Ungrateful people breed negativity. No one gets any pleasure from giving to an ungrateful person. When you show appreciation, the object of your attention blossoms and flourishes. ~ Paul McCabe

When they would return to one another from their solitariness, they returned gently as dew comes to the morning grass. ~ David Paul Kirkpatrick

I don't program or code or anything like that. ~ Rand Paul

It does not matter how many talents we have, what matters is how we use them. ~ Paul H. Dunn

I've been accused of wanting to allow terrorists to have weapons to attack America. ~ Rand Paul

Reflections on Careers in Quantitative Finance

Carnegie Mellon's Steve Shreve is out with an interesting post on careers in quantitative finance, with his commentary on the changing landscape in quantitative research and the implications for financial education. ~ Paul Ellis

There's no substitute for guts. ~ Paul Bryant

Going on unemployment was a total low point for me, but it was also the point when I promised myself I'd write every day from 9 to 5. ~ Paul Downs Colaizzo

I get bored quickly. I kind of take my hat off to bands who have been around for a long time and still do the same thing, because it's hard to keep a band together for decades. But I couldn't do that. I couldn't play the same songs night after night or just trade on my past glories, because it wouldn't interest me as a person. ~ Paul Weller

She was bold, and yet she was reserved. She was sensual and girlish, but she was never coy. So I think that what she projected was a vitality and freshness that for many people came to stand for American womanhood. It's what made American women attractive: that outdoor complexion, that wonderful figure, and yet that carriage, that demureness, that suggested that she was in charge of herself and not to be had. ~ Paul Fees

Paul himself says that he was converted to a follower of Jesus because he had personally encountered the resurrected Jesus.12 So we have Jesus' resurrection attested by friend and foe alike, which is very significant. ~ Lee Strobel

You'll have more visions and thoughts to prepare you. Your heart's desire shows you the future. We put Angels in the sky to show you that we are in your life, and you are on path. ~ Paul Stefaniak

The public already knows about me more than I ever wanted it to know. ~ Paul Reubens

I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing. ~ Paul Cezanne

Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy. ~ Paul Theroux

The silver lining of those years when I was trying to get 'Tinkers' published but couldn't were the years when I had to decide, Why do I want to be a writer? I realized that writing is the thing itself; writing is not a means to publication, writing is not a predicate of publication, so I spent years making art for art's sake. ~ Paul Harding

The corncob was the central object of my life. My father was a horse handler, first trotting and pacing horses, then coach horses, then work horses, finally saddle horses. I grew up around, on, and under horses, fed them, shoveled their manure, emptied the mangers of corncobs. ~ Paul Engle

It's absolutely critical that we audit the Fed so the American people can see what's going on over there. Do it from top to bottom so that we can have transparency in this entity called the Federal Reserve. Hopefully, the American people will see that we need to go back to the gold standard, which I've introduced, and get rid of the Fed. ~ Paul Broun

The United States is a concept that works very well, even in bad times. But that's no reason to think its structure can be superimposed with success on any other part of the world, particularly when times are terrible. ~ Paul Johnson

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics ~ Paul Auster

Pope John Paul would be more popular if he called himself Pope John Paul George and Ringo. ~ Paul Krassner

He had strawberry blond hair. That's enough right there. That's all you need to know. If you're a man with strawberry blond hair and you're not in the circus or a Viking, odds are you have not found your place in life and never will. ~ Paul Neilan

Ubuntu is about a community coming together to help one another. ~ Paul Pierce

-so that for these few moments it actually seems that Ruprecht could be right, that everything, or at least the small corner of everything that is the Seabrook Sports Hall, is resonating to the same chord, the same feeling, the one that over a lifetime you learn a million ways to camouflage but never quite to banish - the feeling living in a world of apartness, of distances you cannot overcome; it's almost as if the strange out-of-nowhere voice is the universe itself, some hidden aspect of it that rises momentarily over the motorway-roar of space and time to console you, to remind you that although you can't overcome the distances, you can still sing the song
out into the darkness over the separating voids, towards a fleeting moment of harmony ... ~ Paul Murray

This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal. ~ Pamela Paul

Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land. ~ Paul Auster

That shot moved like ... I was going to say a shop, but the shop's shut ~ Paul Merson

Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a gross violation of that nation's sovereignty and an affront to the international community. ~ Rand Paul

Man's condition is never the same; he is humbled, then exalted; sometimes at peace, sometimes persecuted; enlightened today and plunged into darkness tomorrow. What is to be done? As I said, let us be prepared for whatever may happen. ~ Vincent De Paul

I mentioned that Jesus came to invade satan's kingdom. When He did, the long period of time covered by the Old Testament permanently changed. Jesus brought a new covenant. When precisely did things change? Theologically, they changed on the cross. Paul explains this in some detail in Colossians when he says that the Father "has delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love" (Col. 1:13). He then goes on to say that we have redemption through His blood (Col. 1:14). The blood that Jesus shed on the cross defeated the enemy, or as Paul later says, "having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it" (Col. 2:15). He declares that Jesus is the "head of all principality and power" (Col. 2:10). ~ C. Peter Wagner