“You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.”

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

Everybody’s journey is individual.

I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.

Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.