The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings.
I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen...
We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become
The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked bu...
The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it ‘ominous’ when black people even talk of having...
It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it. In
I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to G...
This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can...
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assum...
The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interpose between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes...
In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word means - the strangest people in one's life are the people one has known and loved, still know and...
I thought she would be fun to have fun with.
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.I simply wondered about th...