“We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.”

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

I have no money to give to you but I have ideas and organizational capacity.

For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.

If man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?

Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.

I am a very curious person; I’ll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion.

I have one abiding religion-human liberty.

Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.

I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.

It’s the place to begin, always — to return to home, literally.

I said: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: “I am a tiger”. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.

Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.

But when you’re deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it’s amazing.

My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.

The media owes the responsibility to constantly tell the public the truth.

There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?

My father helped me leave. He said, ‘It’s all out there, it’s not here.’

We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.

We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

Inflation is not all bad. After all, it has allowed every American to live in a more expensive neighborhood without moving.

Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life.

One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.

But I’m the only one who can paint the moon, because I’m the only one who knows whether that’s right or not.

I’ll bet every great thinker and leader we’ve got Could see all kinds of things other people could not!