Just staying together is not a real virtue, if you're not happy. Or you're being denied. Or one person is being squashed. Or you really don't love each other; you're just there out of habit. That doesn't work, no matter how many years you stay together.

Ruby Dee

The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity.

Ruby Dee

My constant battle is putting aside time wasters, and I have to watch out for procrastination. Staying on the path of something you're trying to create has much to do with having confidence in yourself and in your capacity to realize the things you want out of life.

Ruby Dee

You can only appreciate freedom when you find yourself in a position to fight for someone else's freedom and not worry about your own.

Ruby Dee

God, make me so uncomfortable that I will do the very thing I fear.

Ruby Dee

We are all a tiger with feelings. An elephant who never forgets. We are tiger, panther, monkey - we are all of these things, all of the life rhythms.

Ruby Dee

The greatest gift is not being afraid to question.

Ruby Dee

Before I latched onto the concept of stereotypes, not once did I reckon with the fact that I would never be a 'Hollywood starlet.'

Ruby Dee

I'm very much interested in getting prisons off the stock market. I'm very much interested in upgrading the public school system... and taking a second look at capital punishment.

Ruby Dee

I never thought about myself as an activist when we were coming along. I love the people I love. I didn't care whether they could be a Democrat, Republican, communist... anything but a racist.

Ruby Dee

Black women have to know the historical and everyday struggles of black men, and our men have to know the struggles of black women in America.

Ruby Dee

Is it safe and sane to only have one political and economic system by which everyone in the world can live? Or can we explore and share? God never made one of anything.

Ruby Dee

Marriage, like love, is an aspiration. It's a process.

Ruby Dee

There is a place for people 65 and older that no other age group can fit. We have nothing to lose. Some of us have a couple pennies. We can go out now and really be revolutionaries.

Ruby Dee

We don't realize how much racism has tainted our self-image as human beings.

Ruby Dee

The Divine Impulse - it's always safe to follow it. We've got to trust it and go wherever it takes us. Especially women.

Ruby Dee

The nature of racism is that it grinds down the soul of the man more finely than it does the soul of the woman. When you want to conquer a people or subject it, you destroy the male component.

Ruby Dee

Oh, I'm impressed with Lorraine Hansberry. She was a genius at whose feet I could sit.

Ruby Dee

You hear people say, 'We take our Tennessee Williams very seriously. There is no laughter here.' It's full of humor! Not to laugh is a big, bad mistake!

Ruby Dee

I learned that having great sensitivity is important. But being strong is just as important.

Ruby Dee

I'm proud of doing 'Long Day's Journey into Night,' for which I won an ACE award.

Ruby Dee