Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.
We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
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.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.
The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.
History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.
Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.
The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.
It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.
You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.
An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.