History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.