The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.

These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.