The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.

If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

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.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.