“A mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed.”

The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the suffering of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad.

But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn’t it only the naive who find all of this baffling?

there are times when life’s ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them.

At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical.

If you’ve a notion of what man’s heart is, wouldn’t you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man’s frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets.

I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

You usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.

Don’t leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

I didn’t come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it’s sickening.

Do you think the Voice would come to me? I would that every one could hear the Voice as I hear it.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

I was mischievous. I wasn’t bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn’t know.

Everybody has done something that we wish we didn’t say or do and wish we could take it back.

Donald Trump – and I don’t dislike Donald one single bit – has no idea how good the Mexican people are at building tunnels.

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.