The moral authority in the Western world is gone. And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record--everybody's record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you're doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call "now," waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything.

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.

You cannot fix what you will not face.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

You write in order to change the world.