It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.

When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

If the word 'integration' means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.