If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons..

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think al….

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. And at suc….

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits..

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself..

This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted..

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living..

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian..

I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster….

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal..

People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street..

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority..

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish….

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to gri….

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changin….

At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it def….

Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I ….

It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was never, quite, my own idea of myself - and Malcol….

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, ev….

Great art can only be created out of love..

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful t….