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.

All racists are irresponsible.

There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed ... But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

Man cannot live by profit alone.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.