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

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

We can make America what America must become.

America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.