People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.

People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

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.

An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.