Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other peop….

I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their….

There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above G….

To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first . . . acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men ….

It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats t….

Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clot….

There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one--you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact whi….

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience..

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and….

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept….

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even la….

If the word 'integration' means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease ….

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs n….

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective….

If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination..

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves..

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees wha….

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak..

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers….

Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love..

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done ….