We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.
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. Rather, th...
Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more ter...
I thought she would be fun to have fun with.
In benighted, incompetent Africa, I had never encountered an orphan: the American streets resembled nothing so much as one vast, howling, unprecedented orphanage. It has been vivid to me for many year...
Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in his relation to his past [the African American] is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is...
People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me an...
In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present cohere...
In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessi...
I don't believe there's a white man in this country, baby, who can get his dick hard, without he hear some nigger moan.
There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.
If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.Or--as they are, indeed, already, in all but actual fact: obsolete. For, if trouble don't last always, as th...
The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the distances they had yet to cover before arriving at that maturity which makes love possible—or no longer...
Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have....
Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky...
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.