It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

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.