It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

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.

Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

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

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.