It comes as a great shock…to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance…has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
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.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
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.
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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