Maya Angelou quotes about courage

Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else's freedom.

Ask for what you want and be prepared to pay for what you get.

Since you're black, you have to hope for the best. Be prepared for the worst and always know that anything can happen.

It is my neck and my life. I will live it whole or not at all.

Never, never let a person know you're frightened. And a group of them … absolutely never.

Every try will not succeed. But if you're going to live, live at all, your business is trying.

Keep on telling the truth, Maya. Stay on the stage. I don't mean the night-club stage, or the theatrical stage. I mean on the stage of life.

Sister, in this country a Negro is always about to get killed, so that ain't nothing. But you tell your husband that a black man was ready to lay down his life for you. That's all.

Don't you ever threaten me. I am an African. I do not scare easily and I do not run at all.

I'll put my foot in that door up to my hip until women of every color can walk over my foot, get in that union, get aboard a ship and go to sea.

I'm not going to run. 'Cause once you do, you have to keep on running.

If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution.

Trying to overcome was black people's honorable tradition.

They shot me and said my fighting days were over, but if I am paralyzed and can only lift my eyelids, I will stare the white oppressors out of Africa.

Oh, but we knew them with the intimacy of a surgeon's scalpel.

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Life doesn’t frighten me at all.

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide

You may write me down in history

Does my sassiness upset you?

My spirit is the surge of open seas.

Because I love to live.

Does my haughtiness offend you?

’Cause tired don’t mean lazy