“There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.”

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.

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

People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

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.