Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]

The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive.

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.