There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In those days my mother was given to th...
The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes— I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether— is that white men do not want their lives, their self-im...
The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else. No amount of improvement can sweeten this fact. Whatever money is now bein...
The Negroes in Harlem, who have no money, spend what they have on such gimcracks as they are sold. These include wider TV screens, more faithful hi-fi sets, more powerful cars, all of which, of course...
Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men. Fran...
Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.
John looked with a child’s impenetrable gravity into the preacher’s face, as though he were turning this question over in his mind and would answer when he had thought it
It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an integrationist - this was never, quite, my own idea of myself - and Malcolm was considered to be a racist in reverse. This form...
It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.
I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place:...
How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?
Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.
Europeans never had the remotest intention of raising Africans to the Western level, of sharing with them the instruments of physical, political or economic power. It was precisely their intention, th...
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don't know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to...
And the darkness of John's sin was like the darkness of the church on Saturday evenings[...] It was like his thoughts as he moved about the tabernacle in which his life had been spent; the tabernacle...
A mob cannot afford to doubt: that the Jews killed Christ or that niggers want to rape their sisters or that anyone who fails to make it in the land of the free and the home of the brave deserves to b...
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
You don't know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn't write. But now I feel like a man who's been trying to climb...