“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.

The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.

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.

Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

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.

The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

I’m sad for adults who want to be children. And children who want to be adults.

I try to tell all the – not even the kids, even people older than me – to just be themselves. Don’t wear what I wear ’cause I wear it; wear what you like.

When I was a kid, my favourite time of the year when I was child was that magical first snowfall. I’d yell Yippee! Snow! and run up to the front door and shout You know the deal… You have to let me in now.

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.

I feel terrible for a Palestinian child who dies. But, if it’s your father, your brother or your uncle who was firing those rockets into Israel, whose fault is it really? Do you really expect the Israelis not to retaliate?

A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.

I applaud anything that can take a kid away from a PlayStation or a Gameboy. That is a miracle in itself.

I try to sign for as many kids as possible. Kids come first, and I’ll always sign for a kid before an adult.