“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”

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.

Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.

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.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.