To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.