It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.

We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?