It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

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

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.