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.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

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