37+ Anna Julia Cooper Quotes On Education, Empowerment And Activism

Anna Julia Cooper was an American educator, author, speaker, and civil rights activist. She was a prominent African American scholar who was one of the first women to receive a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne. She was a strong advocate for racial and gender equality and her work is still relevant today. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Anna Julia Cooper on education, empowerment, activism.

Top 10 Anna Julia Cooper Quotes

1. Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.
2. Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.
3. All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs.
4. The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.
5. One needs occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God.
6. Teach [our girls] that there is a race with special needs which they and only they can help; that the world needs and is already asking for their trained, efficient forces.
7. I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.
8. Agnosticism has nothing to impart. Its sermons are the exhortations of one who convinces you he stands on nothing and urges you to stand there too.
9. ... women are more quiet. They don't feel called to mount a barrel and harangue by the hour every time they imagine they have produced an idea.
10. Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.

Anna Julia Cooper Short Quotes

• A race cannot be purified from without.
• A stream cannot rise higher than its source.
• Woman's cause is one and universal.
• No man can prophesy with another's parable.
• Nothing natural can be wholly unworthy.

Anna Julia Cooper Quotes About Life

Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken. — Anna Julia Cooper

Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development - begun now and ending never. And a life made true cannot confine itself - it must reach out and twine around every pulsing interest within reach of its uplifting tendrils. — Anna Julia Cooper

As in an icicle the agnostic abides alone. The vital principle is taken out of all endeavor for improving himself or bettering hisfellows. All hope in the grand possibilities of life are blasted. — Anna Julia Cooper

... religion (ought to be if it isn't) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development--begun now and ending never. — Anna Julia Cooper

Anna Julia Cooper Famous Quotes And Sayings

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.' — Anna Julia Cooper

It is not the intelligent woman v. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman v. man. Nay, tis woman's strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice. — Anna Julia Cooper

I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving. — Anna Julia Cooper

The impulse of humanity toward social progress is like the movement in the currents of a great water system, from myriad sources and under myriad circumstances and conditions, beating onward, ever onward toward its eternity, the Ocean. — Anna Julia Cooper

One of the most singular facts about the unwritten history of this country is the consummate ability with which Southern influence, Southern ideas and Southern ideals, have from the very beginning even up to the present day, dictated to and domineered over the brain and sinew of this nation. — Anna Julia Cooper

... the majority of colored men do not yet think it worth while that women aspire to higher education.... The three R's, a littlemusic and a good deal of dancing, a first rate dress-maker and a bottle of magnolia balm, are quite enough generally to render charming any woman possessed of tact and the capacity for worshipping masculinity. — Anna Julia Cooper

It is the curse of minorities in this power-worshipping world that either from fear or from an uncertain policy of expedience they distrust their own standards and hesitate to give voice to their deeper convictions, submitting supinely to estimates and characterizations of themselves as handed down by a not unprejudiced dominant majority. — Anna Julia Cooper

... so long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon; with one face (the man's face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was disc or sphere. — Anna Julia Cooper

Each is under the most sacred obligation not to squander the material committed to him, not to sap his strength in folly and vice, and to see at the least that he delivers a product worthy the labor and cost which have been expended on him. — Anna Julia Cooper

Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant what I fear it still means to some men in our own day - respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort. — Anna Julia Cooper

With five to ten hundred pure-minded young women threading the streets of the village every evening unattended, vice must slink away, like frost before the rising sun. — Anna Julia Cooper

The great, the fundamental need of any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice; and there cannot be heroism, devotion, or sacrifice in a primarily skeptical spirit. — Anna Julia Cooper

The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem. — Anna Julia Cooper

If our vaunted rule of the people does not breed nobler men and women than monarchies have done it must and will inevitably give place to something better. — Anna Julia Cooper

Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society. — Anna Julia Cooper

If women were once permitted to read Sophocles and work with logarithms, or to nibble at any side of the apple of knowledge, there would be an end forever to their sewing on buttons and embroidering slippers. — Anna Julia Cooper

Humanity from the first has had its vultures and sharks, and representatives of the fraternity who prey upon mankind may be expected no less in America than elsewhere. That this virulence breaks out most readily and commonly against colored persons in this country, is due of course to the fact that they are, generally speaking, weak and can be imposed upon with impunity. Bullies are always cowards at heart. — Anna Julia Cooper

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class-it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity. — Anna Julia Cooper

Life Lessons by Anna Julia Cooper

1. Anna Julia Cooper taught that education is a powerful tool for achieving social justice and self-determination. She believed that education should be accessible to all, regardless of race or gender.
2. Through her work, Cooper showed that hard work and dedication can lead to success, even in the face of adversity.
3. Cooper's life and work serves as an example of resilience and determination in the face of oppression, and she encourages us to strive for a more equitable and just world.