“For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

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

Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.

Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

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.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.

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

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

Revolution is an inalienable right of mankind. Freedom is an imperishable birth right of all. Labor is the real sustainer of society, the sovereignty of the ultimate destiny of the workers.

In 1985, I joined my mother in a protest against apartheid in which we were arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. And she was at President-elect Mandela’s side in Johannesburg when he claimed victory in South Africa’s first free elections.

How many must die before we can really have a free and true and peaceful society?

Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.

The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.

When you learn to be alone and not feel lonely, is when you learn to be free.

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what the winds are to oceans and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.