Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.
Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.
God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.
Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.
A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.
You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.