Langston Hughes Quotes

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows, Help us to see That without the dust the rainbow Would not be.

So since I’m still here livin’, I guess I will live on. I could’ve died for love– But for livin’ I was born.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain– All, all the stretch of these great green states– And make America again!

Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language.

I will not take ‘but’ for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy’s ‘but’ too long.

Words Like Freedom There are words like Freedom Sweet and wonderful to say. On my heartstrings freedom sings All day everyday. There are words like Liberty That almost make me cry. If you had known what I know You would know why.

Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Do you know that there are libraries in our country that will not stock a book by a Negro writer, not even as a gift? There are towns where Negro newspapers and magazines cannot be sold except surreptitiously. There are American magazines that have never published anything by Negroes. There are film studios that have never hired a Negro writer. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.