The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
RALPH ELLISONThe truth is the light and the light is the truth.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
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That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.
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Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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…and yet I am what they think I am.
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Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
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Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
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Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
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It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
RALPH ELLISON