Levering Quotes & Sayings

The African Americans' story is one that seems to be a repeated commitment to a scenario for success and failure. With each failure, the blow is that much more traumatizing until finally one reaches a point where there is to some degree an internalization, skepticism, fatalism, and expectation that it isn't going to work. — David Levering Lewis

Harlem was an exciting place in the '50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still. — David Levering Lewis

Harlem was a development, a developer's dream and a place where residents had more space and more amenities than ever before. The subway reached 145th street about 1904, and it seemed that Harlem's destiny was to become largely a preserve of successful ethnics relocating and arriving. Then, overnight, the bust took place. — David Levering Lewis

I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University. — David Levering Lewis

Philosophically, Dubois may have had no problem with a great African American institution. On the other hand, he always believed ultimately in the co-mingling of groups and the interplay of talents and in the collaboration of groups. — David Levering Lewis

The animosity that the overwhelming majority of Americans felt toward domestic communists and their sympathizers between 1917 and 1944 - an attitude that typically was more intense and more consistent than the public's generally distrustful but varying views of the U.S.S.R. - helps to explain why America's international/domestic Cold War developed so swiftly after the wartime alliance with Russia ended. U.S.-Soviet — Ralph B. Levering

1900 was a bit of mixed bag, it seems to me, on the one hand, because this is the year when this country becomes the premiere producer of manufactured goods. Clearly, a lot of people were making a lot of money, but it's also a time that reflects the savaging of one of the deepest depressions. — David Levering Lewis

In 1900, as the immigrants come down the gangplank into Jersey City, they expect the streets to be paved with gold, and they were only paved with gold in Frank Baum's 'The Wizard of Oz,' of course. — David Levering Lewis

After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag - the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition. — David Levering Lewis

I came to New York when I was eighteen years old, and the first audition that I ever went to was this huge cattle call at the Equity building where I had gone two days earlier to sign up - I didn't have an agent or anything. — Kate Levering

This book is dedicated to all good teachers everywhere, most particularly those of the William Levering School and Central High School in Philadelphia, to whom more is owed than can ever be repaid. — Michael Swanwick

Eating-wise, I'm fairly disciplined. I have to be, because if you're not eating correctly, you're not giving your body the fuel it needs. So, I stay away from carbs after the morning, and I eat a lot of protein - fish, chicken, and no red meat. — Kate Levering

Writing is draining. Every word is like lifting a stone and levering it into place. Your head aches, your muscles ache and every word you conjure up is heavier than the last one. — Chloe Thurlow

I never read reviews - I never have. I've never read message boards, either. I'm just not interested in it in any way - I'm not interested in it inflating my ego, and I'm not interested in it improving my self-worth. So, I don't read them. — Kate Levering

The commitment to literacy was constant on the part of African Americans. And the percentages of literacy by the end of the century, by 1900, basic literacy has galloped ahead. People believed that education, of course, was the turnstile for advancement. — David Levering Lewis

Those closest to us have first claim to our acts of love. — Matthew Levering

The education business is a little murky because by 1900, it has been pretty well decided that a certain amount of education was required to make the system of repression work. You had to have people who showed up punctually. You had to have people who took their orders obediently and understand them fully. — David Levering Lewis

It is still evident that the problem of finances is an enormously important one. The lack of money to do the job and to compete successfully for audiences with elaborate and attractive commercial programs seems almost hopeless. As far back as 1936, Doctor [Levering] Tyson . . . stated at the joint meeting of the Council and the Institute for Education by Radio at Columbus: Unfortunately, there is not much chance to get money until there is some general understanding of, and agreement in, country-wide objectives to which local and regional objectives can be fitted, and until controversy over these objectives is eliminated so that a unified plan of procedure can be followed — Judith C. Waller

Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance ... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure. — David Levering Lewis

I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience. — David Levering Lewis

Harlem was the main chance for the east end of New York, for eastsiders, as that real estate boom that took place in the 1890s - and it was a preposterous one where people bought and sold, and everything appreciated with each sale - and eventually, of course, the house of cards would crumble. — David Levering Lewis

A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years. — David Levering Lewis

Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation-the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west. — David Levering Lewis

It was clear to many American working men and women that the Homestead Steel Strike of the early 1890s, when Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick broke the backs of the steel workers, that that was a watershed. — David Levering Lewis

There was a very famous leader in Atlanta who thought that education was appropriate, but on the whole, the view was, 'If you're going to keep people down, you have to keep them ignorant. And so, nothing personal, but we just don't want to recognize the attributes that man of learning would bring. Quite threatening, those would be.' — David Levering Lewis

Let This Voice Be Heard fulfills the mandate of biography at its best because Maurice Jackson has captured the history of a great moral movement's origins in a single, extraordinary life. An indispensable addition to the antislavery bibliography. — David Levering Lewis

The business of return migration is a phenomenon that historians have indeed begun to look at, but it is rather an ignored and underplayed story and one that we need to know more about. — David Levering Lewis

In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism ... scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity. — David Levering Lewis

I've been dancing since I was seven, but I never really developed a regimen until I was on Broadway and responsible for a professional performance every night. — Kate Levering

I really try to get eight hours of sleep, and I really try not to go out after a Tuesday or Friday night show because I know I have a two-show day the following day. — Kate Levering

I adapt my workouts to what my needs are. — Kate Levering

Most of history is indisputably written by the winners, yet "winning" at Poitiers actually meant that the economic, scientific, and cultural levels that Europeans attained in the thirteenth century could almost certainly have been achieved more than three centuries earlier had they been included in the Muslim world empire. — David Levering Lewis

I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory. — David Levering Lewis

A great place to work is one in which you trust the people you work for, have pride in what you do, and enjoy the people you work with. — Robert Levering

Government doesn't do much for the new Americans. The assumption is that they'll take care of themselves if they work hard enough. — David Levering Lewis