The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

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

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person - ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.