I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil.

You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours. (To Black Panther militant Eldridge Cleaver)

I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.

Many times I wondered whether my achievement was worth the loneliness I experienced, but now I realize the price was small.

The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.

Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.

Enthusiasm is the electricity of life