Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.

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

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.