The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fanc...
Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the uni...
The spreading of the Gospel, regardless of the motives or the integrity or the heroism of some of the missionaries, was an absolutely indispensable justification for the planting of the flag.
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in...
Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women...
It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.
It is said that [Shakespeare's] time was easier than ours, but I doubt it—no time can be easy if one is living through it.
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 have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that fa...
For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure’s inventions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you ar...
This world is white no longer and it will never be white again.
That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That's how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwise y...
And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.
You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
The vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live.
Nobody can stay in the Garden of Eden.
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
I know what I'm asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand-and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general,...