Lillian Smith Quotes

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

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

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives...

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.

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

They are trying to hold on to a world that no longer exists. They are blind and terrified because they feel it slipping away from them. They are gripping thin air but they keep trying desperately to hold on to it - hoping the air will turn into something familiar and solid.

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.

Children's books do not exist in a vacuum, unrelated to literature as a whole. They are a portion of universal literature and must be subjected to the same standards of criticism as any other form of literature.

So we learned the dance that cripples the human spirit, step by step by step, we who were white and we who were colored, day by day, hour by hour, year by year until the movements were reflexes and made for the rest of our life without thinking.

The mother who taught me what I know of tenderness and love and compassion taught me also the bleak rituals of keeping Negroes in their 'place.' The father who rebuked me for an air of superiority toward schoolmates from the mill and rounded out his rebuke by gravely reminding me that 'all men are brothers,' trained me in the steel-rigid decorums I must demand of every colored male. They who so gravely taught me to split my body from my mind and both from my 'soul,' taught me also to split my conscience from my acts and Christianity from southern tradition.

[The truth] is what actually happens. Not what you want to happen. Not what you're afraid will happen. We make up stories when we want things to happen or are afraid they may happen. And sometimes we do it for fun-or to scare people or make them do our way or to hurt them. And sometimes we do it because it's a pretty story and we tell it just as we fly a kite or send balloons floating.

I keep thinking about the fragmented quality of human awareness: You take your blindness for granted most of the time then suddenly it stuns you: how little you see as you plunge ahead from minute to minute, day to day, year to year - vision cut down to the arc of a flickering flashlight, never sure how your words and acts are affecting someone else because you never really see that someone as he is. I know we should find even the most serene life unendurable were we to possess to any real degree those extrasensory perceptions which our grandmothers believed in...

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.

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within. —Lillian Smith, author, social critic, and notorious fighter for equal rights The

[The truth] is what actually happens. Not what you want to happen. Not what you're afraid will happen. We make up stories when we want things to happen or are afraid they may happen. And sometimes we do it for fun-or to scare people or make them do our way or to hurt them. And sometimes we do it because it's a pretty story and we tell it just as we fly a kite or send balloons floating.

Lillian Smith closely observed the young women she encountered. In 1956, she had harsh words for Vassar students. "They shun wisdom, vision, love, compassion, hope." Smith noted that above all else they sought "security from hope. If they have hope, then they will have to assume the responsibility that lies before them. But as long as one is hopeless, one need do nothing, be nothing: hopelessness can pay high dividends (especially in the world we all art, literature, etc. etc.).

These ceremonials in honor of white supremacy, performed from babyhood, slip from the conscious mind down deep into muscles . . . and become difficult to tear out. — LILLIAN SMITH , Killers of the Dream (1949)

LILLIAN SMITH, Killers of the Dream (1949)

I believe the white man's problem is a complicated thing centered at the core of our culture but that we could change the whole picture within a year or two if we wanted to and felt an urgent necessity to do so (I say in detail how I think this could be done); that I do not think the race problem is "economic" but that it reaches down to men's fundamental needs and dream and values. I think our problem is not so much one of false beliefs but of a profound lack of any belief at all. [...] I talk about the symbolic significance of civil rights and why it is such dangerous strategy for us to delay and delay giving these rights once and for all to our people.

I have been called "brave"; I am not brave. I am afraid, terribly afraid that democracy and Christianity and perhaps the world itself will be destroyed if we who believe in love and brotherhood and children growing do not begin quickly to live our beliefs.

There is no person, no group of people, no nation, that does not make grave mistakes. The test is: can they rectify their mistake? A man's honor becomes involved in how he meets this test; his sense of responsibility for the future of his children and the human race becomes involved.

Read it: you see within its pages so many open spaces left for growth. The people can do wrong, yes; we have in the past and will again; but our Constitution holds within it the potentials for doing right and the machinery for correcting our errors - and they will be corrected as soon as enough of us realize that change is needed.

But modern man is embarrassed about this need to be related; he keeps wishing he were solid and self-sufficient and tries to behave as if he is. And holding on to this false confidence, and refusing faith, he cuts himself off from what he need not do without - almost as if to convince himself that he can do so. Being armored in arrogance he finds it hard to genuflect to an unproved God, and impossible to relate to Him. How strange! For we all cling to meanings we cannot prove just as we cling to love and hope, and to art whose importance to the human being in us, thought unproved, we are somehow sure of.

The Movement thinks of itself as a valid expression of the democratic way; and its leaders remember that democracy is not a system, that it has no ideology; it is a way of life, a Tao, a continuous series of specific attempts to protect every individual's freedom to grow, to ask questions, to work, to explore inner and outer space, to create the New Thing and the New Relationship.

The Faith of Jimmy Carter Carter grew up in the Southern Baptist Church that had dominated many parts of the South since the Civil War. As a child, he regularly attended Sunday school, worship services, and the Royal Ambassadors, an organization for young boys that focused on missions, at the Baptist church in Plains, Georgia. At age eleven, Carter publicly professed his faith in Jesus Christ as his personal Savior and Lord, was baptized, and joined the church. Thereafter, he participated faithfully in the Baptist Young People’s Union. Carter’s religious convictions and social attitudes were strongly shaped by his mother, Lillian. In 1958, Carter was ordained as a deacon, the governing office in Southern Baptist congregations, and he ushered, led public prayers, and preached lay sermons at his home church. His failure to win the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966 prompted Carter to reassess his faith. Challenged by a sermon entitled ‘‘If You Were Arrested for Being a Christian, Would There Be Enough Evidence to Convict You?’’ and conversations with his sister, evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, he vowed to make serving Christ and others his primary aim. During the 1966 governor’s race, he had spent sixteen to eighteen hours a day trying to convince Georgians to vote for him. ‘‘The comparison struck me,’’ Carter wrote, ‘‘300,000 visits for myself in three months, and 140 visits for God [to witness to others] in fourteen years!’’ Carter soon experienced a more intimate relationship with Christ and inner peace. He read the Bible ‘‘with new interest’’ and concluded that he had been a Pharisee. He went on witnessing missions, attended several religious conferences, and oversaw the showing of a Billy Graham film in Americus, Georgia.

Lillian Smith’s reflection on her Southern childhood: “I do not remember how or when, but by the time I had learned that God is love, that Jesus is His Son and came to give us more abundant life, that all men are brothers with a common Father, I also knew that I was better than a Negro, that all black folks have their place and must be kept in it, that a terrifying disaster would befall the South if ever I treated a Negro as my social equal.

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

By the middle of the twentieth century, the white working-class American, wrote the white southern author Lillian Smith, "has not only been neglected and exploited, he has been fed little except the scraps of 'skin color' and 'white supremacy' as spiritual nourishment.