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?

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

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

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

To be born in a free society and not to be born free is to be born into a lie. To be told by co-citizens and co-Christians that you have no value, no history, have never done anything that is worthy of human respect destroys you because in the beginning you believe it.

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.