I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war love is a growing up.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.