“The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.”

A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.

Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense.

Virtue knows no color line.

In fact, for all kinds of offenses – and, for no offenses – from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the same.

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.

Those who commit the murders write the reports.

The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.

Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.

Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.

The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.

I came home every Friday afternoon, riding the six miles on the back of a big mule. I spent Saturday and Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my country school on Sunday afternoon.

It is extremely rough to follow through with my goals, but I felt a responsibility to show the world what the African Americans are facing through this rough patch.

I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance.

I honestly believe I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches.

The white man’s victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation and murder.

The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Boxing is changing and training methods are slowly being dragged into the 21st century.

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.

If you can’t laugh at yourself, you may be missing the colossal joke of the century.

Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.

The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.

The proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem underscores how stable mathematics is through the centuries – how mathematics is one of humanity’s long continuous conversations with itself.

The life story of the five main characters and the secondary characters around them allows Jonathan Franzen to present the full impetus and extent of the world picture of the West at the end of the 20th century.