Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

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.

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.