Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.