And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you.

I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.

It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're reading in the library, at home and so on, but you're intensely alive. In fact you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets of New York in crowds, with no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.

You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good.

The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.

He who learns death unlearns slavery.

The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.