Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
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.
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.
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 this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
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 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.