I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no...
How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?
Color hate defined the place of black life as below that of white life; and the black man, responding to the same dreams as the white man, strove to bury within his heart his awareness of this differe...
It was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with other people.
There are times, Your Honor, when reality bears features of such an impellingly moral complexion that it is impossible to follow the hewn path of expediency. There are times when life’s ends are so ra...
So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting.
Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pit...
One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet. With
Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be quit of them ; but even after obeying, aft...
Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs.
Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .I was taking a part of the Southto transplant in alien soil,to see if it could grow differently,if it could drink of new and cool rains,be...
Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality.
Dewdrop joins dewdropTill a petal holds a poolReflecting its rose.
Whether he’ll follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who’ll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he’ll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-...
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
They wouldn’t let me live and I killed. Maybe it ain’t fair to kill, and I reckon I really didn’t want to kill.
There was a hunger for power reaching out of the senses of man and trying to say something in the symbols of action.
So far removed are these practices from what the average American citizen encounters in his daily life that it takes a huge act of his imagination to believe that it is true;
She twisted from him and ran, nude, to the opposite wall. When he came at her this time §he screamed again and ran into the kitchen. She flicked on the light and stood nude amid the white refrigerator...