 The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all. |
| 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. |
| Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it. |
| 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. |
| To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. |
| To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. |
| 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. |
| It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. |
| 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. Topics: Love |
| The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in. |
| You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. |
| There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| I want to be an honest man and a good writer. |
| Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. |
| 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. |
| Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours. |
