Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?" "Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel." "And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

Employment is my right my destiny.

To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first . . . acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are [;] . . . the second . . . that one must never, in one's life, accept . . . injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.