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"Personally I discovered that you could go through the academy as a young scholar, come out, and almost immediately have an impact on the academic environment."
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"If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."

"We are in the process of finding out what filling billions of acres with electrified glass that emits electromagnetic intereference (EMI) does to the global environment."

"It is absolutely certain that we must act to protect nature much more efficiently than ever before. Tomorrow " when mankind will step forward to a totally uncertain future " will be too late."

"We need to consciously remember that we have more responsibility to protect our planet, because without it we have nowhere else to live."

"It never occurred to us that the Earth itself might have been unyielding."

"The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future."

"I know that men are so eager to be one among the stars.I feel that damaged earth will never let men go off hand."

"The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships."

"Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you."

"The blue of daylightfades and chills as the sun sinksbeneath clouds of fire."
Explore more quotes by Bernice Johnson Reagon


"The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life."


"The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American."


"I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song."


"I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life."


"Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are."


"In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn't convince other people to really do it. And this year, I'm not running it."


"One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since."


"It makes sense that whatever the topic is, it's more compelling if you can provide the audience with a range of perspectives, and you can cross disciplines. And you don't have to control what people take out of it."


"Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn't have religion."
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