The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

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