Prepared to make the ultimate wartime sacrifice that most governments demand of their able-bodied citizens, but his was one that regarded his life as of lesser value than the lives of whites making th...
We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for...
Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization--pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I've heard)--which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by co...
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held...
Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themsel...
It's you young folks what's going to make the changes, y'all's the ones. You got to lead and you got to fight and move us all on up a little higher. And I tell you something else, it's the ones from t...
If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided the un...
If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided uncert...
If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.
I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth.
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.
And let's remember that science isn't a game of chess, although chess may be played scientifically. The other thing to remember is that if we are to organize the masses we must first organize ourselve...
All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.
All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.
They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves and I'd help them. I laughed. Here I had thought they accept...
The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak.
Leaving him and going out into the paint-fuming air I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien per...