Quotes from James Weldon Johnson

In spite of the bans which musicians and music teachers have placed on it, the people still demand and enjoy Ragtime.

New Yorkers and people visiting New York from the world over go to the night-clubs of Harlem and dance to such jazz music as can be heard nowhere else; and they get an exhilaration impossible to duplicate.

I can imagine no more dissatisfied human being than an educated, cultured, and refined colored man in the United States.

I was at the same time impressed with the falsity of the general idea that Frenchmen are excitable and emotional, and that Germans are calm and phlegmatic. Frenchmen are merely gay and never overwhelmed by their emotions. When they talk loud and fast, it is merely talk, while Germans get worked up and red in the face when sustaining an opinion, and in heated discussions are likely to allow their emotions to sweep them off their feet.

When one has seen something of the world and human nature, one must conclude, after all, that between people in like stations of life there is very little difference the world over.

I lived to learn that in the world of sport all men win alike, but lose differently;

The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

evil is a force, and, like the physical and chemical forces, we cannot annihilate it; we may only change its form. We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen other forms.

To many, especially among coloured people, a Harlem night-club is a den of iniquity, where the Devil holds high revel. The fact is that the average night-club is as orderly as many a Sunday-school picnic has been.

The doctrine of the Declaration of Independence was not without some collateral

How yo' gloom tu'ns into gladness,   How yo' joy drives out de doubt When de oven do' is opened,   An' de smell comes po'in' out;

Temperamentally, he belonged to that class of poets who Taine says are vessels too weak to contain the spirit of poetry, the poets whom poetry kills, the Byrons, the Burns's, the De Mussets, the Poes.

O, de light-bugs glimmer down de lane,   Merlindy! Merlindy! O, de whip'-will callin' notes ur pain—   Merlindy, O, Merlindy!

It's no disgrace to be black, but it's often very inconvenient.

It is strange how in some things honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction.

In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life.

And God stepped out on space, and He looked around and said: I'm lonely - I'll make me a world.

Every race and every nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst.

I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.

but if the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall.

Music is a universal art; anybody's music belongs to everybody; you can't limit it to race or country.

Paris practices its sins as lightly as it does its religion, while London practices both very seriously.

It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.

Listen!--- Listen! All you sons of Pharaoh. Who do you think can hold God's people when the Lord God himself has said, Let my people go?