But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

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