Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from...
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on...
Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young...
And: the only way anything ever gets done is when you make up your mind to do it.
And the others, who have avoided all of these deaths, get up in the morning and go downtown to meet the man. They work in the white man’s world all day and come home in the evening to this fetid block...
Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had...
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, a...
Ah! she said, men may be at the mercy of womenI think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them. But if a particular is ever at the mercy of a particular why, he's somehow stopped being a...
ANY REAL CHANGE IMPLIES THE breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine...
A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his p...
I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them...
Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more pre...
The things that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally,...
The past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
Large part of her simplicity consisted in determining not to want what she could not have with ease. So
Civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
But what men imagine they are doing and what they are doing in fact are rarely the same thing.
You stop that,’ he said, in a voice which he did not recognise. ‘You stop that. You stop trying to kill me. It’s not my fault I’m white. It’s not my fault you’re black. It’s not my fault he’s dead.
You can always drive to your destination, but a true journey is made on foot.