We take our shape it is true within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.
All men were like this, their thoughts rose no higher, and they lived only to gratify on the bodies of women their brutal and humiliating needs. One
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who alw...
Yes, he had heard it all his life, but it was only now that his ears were opened to this sound that came from darkness, that could only come from darkness, that yet bore such sure witness to the glory...
This past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.
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...
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 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 impossible is the least that one can demand.
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken...
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques...
People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.
One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. On...
One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself - that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
It’s a long way, John said slowly, ain’t it? It’s a hard way. It’s uphill all the way.
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 is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination,...
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which n...