The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system.  Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.

English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.

In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.

Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.

... it takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.

In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.

A business society, therefore, always has in its children a large group of individuals who cannot make money and who do not understand (or want to understand) the profit motive. In short, they are subversives.