“I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.”

Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.

I haven’t been to sleep for over a year. That’s why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn’t sleep.

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them…

I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

We possess nothing certainly except the past.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Does that not sound odd to you? When God decides who should live or die, he is immoral, When you decide who should live or die, it’s your moral right. There was a pin-drop silence.

The best advice I have been given is to live in the moment, as cliché as that sounds. It’s crazy.

I really do live for the future, because when I’m eating a box of candy, I can’t wait to taste the last piece.

For me, democratic socialism is about – really, the value for me is that I believe that in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much the problem of what you will do with Negro, as what the Negro will do with you and your ‘civilization’.