“No man is a devil in his own mind.”

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.

Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.

Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Literature is indispensable to the world.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

When we bring deep awareness to whatever’s bothering us, the same things might be happening, but we are able to relate to them differently.

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.

Leadership has a harder job to do than just choose sides. It must bring sides together.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Those who criticize our generation forget who raised it.

But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.