Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

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

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.