Quotes from Barbara Chase-Riboud

too much love like too much rain begets large and bloody pools of discontent. I see my winter marked in your eyes. Whoever told you I was perfection?'-exerpt from Valide

No frontier for an American is uncrossable, including the so-called color line, and no person in the United States is an alien because of his color.

Let the South," I said slowly, "spend every single penny of their treasure, which colored people have earned for them. Let them spill a drop of their own blood for every drop of colored people's blood they've spilled or contaminated. I have no pity and contemplate no mercy for the so-called bleeding Confederacy.

It seems that politics is becoming a millionaire's club...a poor man just doesn't have a chance these days. It is true that America is becoming more and more anti-revolutionary and anti-democratic--but as long as Americans feel such awe and envy for wealth and power, men like Scranton have a tremendous glamour over any other person no matter how well qualified or intelligent. [1962]

An informed public depends upon literacy and language: its good use, conception, comprehension and incorruptibility.

A literate society depends on three things: culture, communication, and choice. One could add that culture is also faith and morality, that communication is also social interaction and equality, and that choice is both individualism and political action.

For Americans, the idea of living in another country has not only exotic, but let us be frank, vaguely unpatriotic connotations. But having to explain what is after all one's own self over and over again makes the American abroad more ferociously patriotic than he would ever dare to be at home.

I think our civilization is minimal enough without underlining it. Sculpture as a created object in space should enrich, not reflect, and should be beautiful. Beauty is its function.