Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language w...
I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.
Those Garveyites I knew could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them, and I pitied them too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was owned by...
I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, h...
If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret o...
Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within...
I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book tha...
I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of t...
Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, then a white doctor or a nurse would come and...
If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or...
He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.
Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires
If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.
I wish I could be an example to you...I knew that I had conquered him, had rid myself of him mentally and emotionally; but I wanted to be sure.You are not an example to me; you could never be, I spat...
I grew silent and reserved as the nature of the world in which I lived became plain and undeniable; the bleakness of the future affected my will to study. Granny had already thrown out hints that it w...
Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the c...
I was seized by doubt. Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror that lay ahead.
The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever, Howe declared. It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred...
A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars.
Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a bat...
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