I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such...
They have never put it into words, they cannot; but each absence is a threat. They never felt this way in New York - they moved all over New York. Here each is afraid that one of the others will get i...
For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you com...
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and...
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
On each piece of paper I found addresses, telephone numbers, memos of various rendezvous made and kept—or perhaps not kept—people met and remembered, or perhaps not remembered, hopes probably not fulf...
The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also so absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is...
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.
The first time I saw Reverend Shuttlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot of the motel where I was staying, his hat perched precariously between the back of his skull and the...
It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either th...
When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly...
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.
She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.
A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, was not merely the action of a mob.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, a...
It's the only light we've got in all this darkness
The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.