Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

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

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.

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.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.