The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.

My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.

A society struggles to fulfill its best instincts, even as an individual does, and generally makes just as hard going of it. The fight against prejudice is an inevitable process. Man has been warring against his own lower nature ever since he found out he had one, and the battle against intolerance is part of the same old struggle between good and evil that has preoccupied us ever since we gave up swinging from trees.

the psychological attitudes which are indispensable in the American market place are disastrous to family life. Family life ... requires yieldingness, generosity, sympathy, altruism, tenderness-all the qualities, in fact, which lead straight to bankruptcy. ... the American family is tragically out of gear with the profit structure which has mushroomed up around it.

Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.

The people who are unprejudiced, but who ... feel it is so hopeless there is no use trying ... probably do just as much damage to the emotional atmosphere in which we are facing the problem as the fanatical Negrophobes.

Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.