Nubian Queens Society

American writer, she survived a tough childhood and early adult to become a singer, actress, activist, and writer.

Selected Maya Angelou Quotations

• How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

• It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.

• A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

• The needs of society determine its ethics.

• One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

• I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition -- about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive.

• I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

• The honorary duty of a human being is to love.

• Living a life is like constructing a building: if you start wrong, you'll end wrong.

• History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

• Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.

• There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

• The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.

• Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns all clean.

• Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

• If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

• Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

• We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

• Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure.

• Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go."

• If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.

• Effective action is always unjust.

• Nothing will work unless you do.

• You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

• Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.

• If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. - from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

• The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

• The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder -- in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.