Daily Inspiration Quote by Eartha Kitt

Eartha Kitt doesn’t plead for tolerance here; she asserts jurisdiction. The line is built like a velvet rope: “our own style of living” sounds almost quaint, then she snaps it shut with “nobody’s business but ours.” That pivot matters. Kitt isn’t arguing that private life is harmless or misunderstood. She’s rejecting the premise that the public gets to audition itself as judge.

The repetition is the engine: “business” twice, “private” twice. She frames intimacy as property and governance, not confession. That word choice carries a working performer’s realism: your body, your desires, your household - those are yours to manage, not the tabloid’s, not the state’s, not the moral majority’s. It’s also a sly reversal of the era’s favorite weapon against women and queer people: publicity. If shame thrives in exposure, Kitt answers with boundaries.

Context sharpens the edge. Kitt’s career unfolded through mid-century respectability politics, when an actress’s “style of living” could become a blacklistable scandal. She also moved through spaces where Black women were expected to be both glamorous and compliant, exotic and contained. This quote reads like someone who has watched “concern” and “curiosity” masquerade as entitlement.

What makes it land is the calmness. No apology, no footnotes, no appeal to being “normal.” It’s not a demand to be liked. It’s a refusal to be managed.