An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.
Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
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.
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
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...
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
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.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
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 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.
The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it. In
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...
Solitude is the home of the strong; silence, their prayer.
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.
In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals. Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim...
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.