Maya Angelou Men Quotations

I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man's humanity to man.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men... We are who we are because they were who they were. It's wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

I've never had a dislike for men. I've been badly treated by some. But I've been loved greatly by some. I married a lot of them.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

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.

When I passed forty I dropped pretense, 'cause men like women who got some sense.

I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.

We agreed that great men and women should be forced to live as long as possible. The reverence they enjoyed was a life sentence, which they could neither revoke nor modify.

The most noble cause known to man is the liberation of the human mind and spirit.

I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my child's mind--seven and a half years old--I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years.

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

If on Judgement Day I were summoned by St. Peter to give testimony to the used-to-be sheriff's act of kindness, I would be unable to say anything in his behalf. His confidence that my uncle and every other Black man who heard of the Klan's coming ride would scurry under their houses to hide in chicken droppings was too humiliating to hear. Without waiting for Momma's thanks, he rode out of the yard, sure that things were as they should be and that he was a gentle squire, saving those deserving serfs from the laws of the land, which he condoned.

I walk into a room Just as cool as you please, And to a man, The fellows stand or Fall down on their knees.

Don't let the man bring you down.

If men are God's gift to women, then God must really love gag gifts.

He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.

It is imperative that young white men and women study the black American history. It is imperative that blacks and whites study the Asian American history.

It is very dangerous to make a person larger than life because, then, young men and women are tempted to believe, well, if he was that great, he's inaccessible, and I can never try to be that or emulate that or achieve that.

I do hope that young men and women will start to think for themselves and start to take responsibility for their own thoughts.