Top 150 Langston Hughes Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding.”

— Langston Hughes

102. “Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest.”

— Langston Hughes

103. “One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.”

— Langston Hughes

104. “Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen!”

— Langston Hughes

105. “A dog gets lonesome just like a human. He wants to associate with other dogs, but when they take him out, the poor dog is on a leash and cannot run around.”

— Langston Hughes

106. “As for reading books, even far-out books, even beatnik books, fine. Only there are not enough books for me down South, which is one reason I came to New York.”

— Langston Hughes

107. “Sometimes I wish the public were equally aware of the men of our race in the cultural fields. You, for instance, have you ever bought a book by a Negro writer?”

— Langston Hughes

108. “I would like to see an America where people of any race, color or creed may live on a plane of cultural, material well-being, cooperating unhindered by sectarian, racial, or factional prejudices that do nobody any good.”

— Langston Hughes

109. “I learnt that the only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you’ll finish it, even if in the beginning you think you can’t do it at all.”

— Langston Hughes

110. “And then the wall rose, Rose slowly, Slowly, Between me and my dream. Rose slowly, slowly, Dimming, Hiding, The light of my dream. Rose until it touched the sky – The wall.”

— Langston Hughes

111. “Money and art are far apart.”

— Langston Hughes

112. “Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.”

— Langston Hughes

113. “Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-.”

— Langston Hughes

114. “Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.”

— Langston Hughes

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

— Langston Hughes

116. “If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed.”

— Langston Hughes

117. “Life is a egg you have to be patient and carefull with it or it will brake.”

— Langston Hughes

118. “Wear it Like a banner For the proud? Not like a shroud.”

— Langston Hughes

119. “To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer – not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.”

— Langston Hughes

120. “As long as what is is-and Georgia is Georgia-I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.”

— Langston Hughes

121. “A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.”

— Langston Hughes

122. “Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.”

— Langston Hughes

123. “People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter – and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.”

— Langston Hughes

124. “Don’t come giving me, who’s old enough to die and too near blind to create anything any more anyhow, a great big banquet that you eat up in honor of your own stomachs as much as in honor of me- who’s toothless and can’t eat.”

— Langston Hughes

125. “Lawrence has a wonderful hill in it, with a university on top and the first time I ran away from home, I ran up the hill and looked across the world: Kansas wheat fields and the Kaw River, and I wanted to go some place, too. I got a whipping for it.”

— Langston Hughes

126. “I know how to handle women who act like ladies, but my landlady ain’t no lady. Sometimes I even wish I was living with my wife again so I could have my own place and not have no landladies.”

— Langston Hughes

127. “When I were a young man, I used to play baseball and steal bases just like Jackie Robinson. If the empire would rule me out, I would get mad and hit the empire.”

— Langston Hughes

128. “It were depression, too. They cut my wages down once at the foundry. They cut my wages down again. Then they cut my wages out, also the job.”

— Langston Hughes

129. “But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There’s a song that says, “the time ain’t long.” That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.”

— Langston Hughes

130. “I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books – where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”

— Langston Hughes

131. “Both of them were very good and kind – the one who went to church and the one who didn’t. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.”

— Langston Hughes

132. “Around the world-even in places where there is almost nothing, the rich, the beautiful, the talented, or the very clever can always get something; in fact, the best of whatever there is.”

— Langston Hughes

133. “Cora was like a tree – once rooted, she stood, in spite of storms and strife, wind, and rocks, in the earth.”

— Langston Hughes

134. “This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.”

— Langston Hughes

135. “We represent the end of race. And the Fascists know that when there is no more race, there will be no more capitalism, and no more war, and no more money for the munition makers, because the workers of the world will have triumphed.”

— Langston Hughes

136. “Now, In June, When the night is a vast softness Filled with blue stars, And broken shafts of moon-glimmer Fall upon the earth, Am I too old to see the fairies dance? I cannot find them any more.”

— Langston Hughes

137. “Who said I want to go to war? If I do, it ain’t the same war the President wants to go to. No, sir, I been hanging on a rope in Alabama too long.”

— Langston Hughes

138. “Once, when I were a child, I were kicked by a small mule. Neither the mule nor I had any sense. I were trying to make the mule go one way, but the mule was trying to make me go another. I were for hitching the mule onto a plow. The mule were for nibbling grass. So, after that kicking, I learned right then and there to respect animals and peoples when they are not of the same mind as you are.”

— Langston Hughes

139. “Why did white folks think you could live on nothing but art? Strange! Too strange! Too strange!”

— Langston Hughes

140. “Adventure is a great thing,” said Simple, “which should be in everybody’s life. According to ‘The Late Late Show’ on TV, in the old days when Americans headed West in covered wagons, they was almost sure to run into adventure – at the very least a battle with the Red Skins. Nowadays, if you want to run into adventure, go to Alabama or Mississippi, where you can battle with the White Skins.”

— Langston Hughes

141. “What a difference a border makes: on one side of an invisible line, food; on the other side, none. On one side, peace. On the other side, war. On one side, quiet in the sunlight. On the other side the dangerous chee-eep, chee-eep, chee-eep, that was not birds, the BANG! of shells, the whine of sirens, and the bursting of bombs over crowded cities.”

— Langston Hughes

142. “She worked for the Studevants, who treated her like a dog. She stood it. Had to stand it; or work for poorer white folks who would treat her worse; or go jobless.”

— Langston Hughes

143. “The silence inside the library, the big chairs, and long tables, and the fact that the library was always there and didn’t seem to have a mortgage on it, or any sort of insecurity about it – all of that made me love it.”

— Langston Hughes

144. “Bring me all of your dreams, You dreamer, Bring me all your Heart melodies That I may wrap them In a blue cloud-cloth Away from the too-rough fingers Of the world.”

— Langston Hughes

145. “When a woman wants to get ahead, she cannot tie a millstone to her feet. Most men is millstones.”

— Langston Hughes

146. “Open your heart, and life will provide unlimited abundance.”

— Langston Hughes

147. “Mortal frailty, greed, and error, know no boundary lines. The explosives of war do not care whose hands fashion them. Certainly, both Marxists and Christians can be cruel. Would that Christ came back to save us all. We do not know how to save ourselves.”

— Langston Hughes

148. “White folks sure is a case!” She laid three slices of bread on top of the stove. “So spoiled with colored folks waiting on ’em all their days! Don’t know what they’ll do in heaven, ’cause I’m gonna sit down up there myself.”

— Langston Hughes

149. “They could not understand that there is some few people in the world who do good without being asked. It were a hot day, I were a little boy, and ice-cream cones are always good. And that man just looked at me and thought I would like one – which I did. That is one reason why I do not hate all white folks today because some white folks will do good without being asked or hauled up before the Supreme Court to have a law promulgated against them.”

— Langston Hughes

150. “Hey you rising workers everywhere greetings.”

— Langston Hughes