People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.

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

Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.