... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance... I now realize th….

Two great areas of deafness existed in the South: White Southerners had no ears to hear that which threatened their Dream. And colored Southerners ha….

If we love-and-serve an ideal we reach backward in time to its inception and forward to its consummation. To grow is sometimes to hurt; but who would….

... the structure of our public morality crashed to earth. Above its grave a tombstone read, "Be tolerant--even of evil." Logically the next step wou….

When we lose love, we lose also our identification with the universe and with eternal values--an identification which alone makesit possible for us t….

A mechanism of some kind stands between us and almost every act of our lives..

A man's real and deep feelings are surely those which he acts upon when challenged, not those which, mellow-eyed and soft-voiced, he spouts in easy t….

Serviceis love in action, love "made flesh"; service is the body, the incarnation of love. Love is the impetus, service the act, and creativity the r….

I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn't love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, ….

The importance of a lost romantic vision should not be underestimated. In such a vision is power as well as joy. In it is meaning.Life is flat, barre….

... in 1950 a very large slice of the white South stood at the crossroads in its attitude toward its colored citizens and [was] psychologically capab….

... most Southerners of my parents' era were raised to feel that it wasn't respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost ev….

To grow is sometimes to hurt, but who would return to smallness?.

Our minorities alone are in a position to know what the fathers of our democracy were talking about..

... the constructive power of an image is not measured in terms of its truth, but of the love it inspires..