The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years

There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.