Ruby Dee Quotes

Her complete name was Ruby Ann Wallace. Ruby Dee was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Oct. 27, 1922, and grew up in Harlem in New York City.

She began acting in high school, and continued at Hunter College. She played on Broadway in 1946, and has acted in movies, plays, radio, and television in a variety of roles, to critical acclaim.

Dee has been active in civil rights causes, including being active in the NAACP, SCLC, and CORE. Ruby Dee was married to actor Ossie Davis from 1948 until his death in 2005, and raised three children. Dee died June 11, 2014, at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 91.





Ruby Dee Quotes: 

•  "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."
• "The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity."
• "The greatest gift is not being afraid to question."
• "Classism and greed are making insignificant all the other kinds of isms."
• "OK, boss, I don't mind shuffling, but I won't scratch my head."
• "You just try to do everything that comes up. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, make the time. Then you look back and say, "Well, that was a neat piece of juggling there - school, marriage, babies, career." The enthusiasms took me through the action, not the measuring of it or the reasonableness."
• "That's what being young is all about. You have the courage and the daring to think that you can make a difference. You're not prone to measure your energies in time. You're not likely to live by equations."
• "Paradise is to be the ultimate instrument, fulfilling God's desperate intent that we love each other."
• "God, make me so uncomfortable that I will do the very thing I fear."
• "It takes a long time to really be married. One marries many times at many levels within that marriage. If you have more marriages than you have divorces within the marriage, you’re lucky and you stick it out."
• "A trustworthy marriage has weathered temptation and anger and jealousy, resentment, self-righteousness and a little bit of selfishness. When you get over and get through that, then maybe you can see the light to love."