Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.