Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.

Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.

There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed ... But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

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