The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.
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...
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
Of course, I must say that I don't think America is God's gift to anybody – if it is, God's days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve– and do serve, in ways that they don't kn...
Yes, Mama. I’m going to try to love the Lord. At this there sprang into his mother’s face something startling, beautiful, unspeakably sad—as though she were looking far beyond him at a long, dark road...
Sin is the only heritage of the natural man...
The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never fai...
The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead. I’m going, M...
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...
The projects are hideous, of course, there being a law, apparently respected throughout the world, that popular housing shall be as cheerless as a prison. They are lumped all over Harlem, colorless, b...
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. . .the history of the American Ne...
He grins again, and everything inside me moves. Oh, love. Love.
Ashore, the palms gently bowed before the wind, mixing the rustling of fronds with the murmur of surf in a captivating voice of mid-ocean solitude. With fully restored mind and body, I sailed away the...
The paradox, and a fearful paradox it is, is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere on any continent as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one's past--one's history--is...
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:...
It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature o...
The life you think you should want,’ said Eric, ‘is always the life that looks safest.
They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of tho...
It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that, as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting. A Negro learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien person...
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
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