You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.