Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.