In the eeriest way possible, I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman. I had almost said, after all,...
In the Negro world, as in the white world, Negroes who have money band together and try to ignore the existence of their unluckier brothers. That is the way the love of money works. But neither money,...
In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it ce...
In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the jurie...
If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country.
If dirty words frighten you...I really don’t know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describ...
I suppose this is why I asked her to marry me: to give me something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can't, unhappily, invent their...
I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Savior had met in me. [...] And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me again—unless, indeed, thi...
I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair.
I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me.
Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world—so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention—and that they cannot possibly hope to rule i...
For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view...
For the rebirth of the soul was perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.
But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for whic...
But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was de...
But it’s not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can’t forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It’s not possi...
But it is part of the business of the writer—as I see it—to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.
As all sailors ultimately learn, it is easier to prepare a boat for sea than to clear the decks of your life for a voyage into unknown waters.
And yet - when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds one-self pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptl...