Top 40 Lorraine Hansberry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Never be afraid to sit a while and think.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

2. “Though it be a thrilling and marvellous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so – doubly dynamic – to be young, gifted and black.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

3. “Everybody talking ’bout heaven ain’t going there!”

— Lorraine Hansberry

4. “This is one of the glories of man, the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit: whenever life doesn’t seem to give an answer, we create one.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

5. “The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

6. “One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and read of the miseries which affect the world.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

7. “Once upon a time freedom used to be life-now it’s money. I guess the world really do change.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

8. “There is always something left to love. And if you haven’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

9. “A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men – and people in general.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

10. “I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

11. “Sometimes, I can see the future stretched out in front of me – just as plain as day. The future hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

12. “When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

13. “Seems like God don’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams – but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

14. “I was born black and female.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

15. “Ball points belong to their age. They make everyone write alike.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

16. “I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

17. “I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

18. “Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

19. “Children see things very well sometimes and idealists even better.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

20. “I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world!”

— Lorraine Hansberry

21. “One for whom bread- food- is not enough.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

22. “I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

23. “Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?”

— Lorraine Hansberry

24. “Cause sometimes it’s hard to let the future begin!”

— Lorraine Hansberry

25. “How we gets to the place where we scared to talk softness to each other.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

26. “That’s what being eccentric means – being natural.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

27. “There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

28. “Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually – without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts? This is what I puzzle about.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

29. “Obviously the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

30. “The grim possibility is that she who ‘hides her brains’ will, more than likely, end up with a mate who is only equal to a woman with ‘hidden brains’ or none at all.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

31. “The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

32. “Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning – because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so! When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

33. “Mama, you don’t understand. It’s all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don’t acept. It’s not important. I am not going out and commit crimes or be immoral because I don’t believe in God. I don’t even think about it. It’s just that I get so tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no God! There is only Man, and it’s he who makes miracles!”

— Lorraine Hansberry

34. “American straightforwardness is almost as disarming as Americans invariably think it is.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

35. “It is difficult for the American mind to adjust to the realization that the Rhetts and the Scarletts were as much monsters as the keepers of Buchenwald-they just dressed more attractively.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

36. “I know he’s rich. He knows he’s rich, too.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

37. “When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists – nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

38. “BENEATHA How can something that’s natural be eccentric? GEORGE That’s what being eccentric means – being natural.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

39. “I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist – that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

40. “The poets have been right in all these centuries, darling; even in its astounding imperfection this earth of ours is magnificent. But oh this human race!”

— Lorraine Hansberry

41. “The Murchisons are honest-to-God-real-foe-rich colored people, and the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich colored people. I though everybody knew that.”

— Lorraine Hansberry

42. “Obviously, the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women, who are twice oppressed. So I imagine that they react accordingly: as oppression makes people more militant, women become twice militant, because they are twice oppressed.”

— Lorraine Hansberry