People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

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.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

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.

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.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

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.

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.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

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.

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.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

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.

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.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.