“I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me…I don’t know which makes me feel worse.”

I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.

Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

In 1985, I was arrested, along with my mother and brother, Martin III, in a protest against apartheid at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C.

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.

Jacob’s little smirk became a full-blown grin, and I knew he was picturing Charlie showing up to arrest him. This grin was too bitter, too full of mocking to satisfy me. This wasn’t the smile I’d been waiting to see.

The word ‘arrested,’ this is semantics. This was all arranged in advance. I was voluntarily processed.

People must understand that people were beaten, arrested, jailed, and some people were murdered, while attempting to register to vote, or to get others to register to vote.

I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home.