Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life