I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, b...
For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.
Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the po...
No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide.
I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilisation. I am far from convinced t...
People love different people in different ways.
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of t...
Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this v...
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. Ho...
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, t...
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit yo...
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.
Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
Nobody can stay in the Garden of Eden.
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
He had been bruised, so to speak, so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.