People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

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

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.