There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.