Gerald Early Quotes

• I think there are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball. They're the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced.

  Gerald Early

  Music, Baseball, Thinking

  10 Copy quote

• It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.

  Gerald Early

  Children, Simple, Men

  6 Copy quote

• Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.

  Gerald Early

  Taken, Winning, Style

  Gerald Lyn Early (1994). “The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture”

  8 Copy quote

• The Miss America contest isthe most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.

  Gerald Early

  Ambition, Class, America

  4 Copy quote

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