The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions..

Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides..

I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive..

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within..

All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee..

Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse….

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me….

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance..

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read..

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him..

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible..

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side..

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black..

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them..

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it..

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it c….

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled..

When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" - it blames "outside agitators" and "Northern interf….

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live..

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I h….

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety..