The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.

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

Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.

Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it. Thus if, for any reason whatsoever, moral standards are conspicuously and unprecedentedly breached in one area of society, such as the political, it will follow as the night the day that those standards will start collapsing all down the line-in sports, entertainment, education, the armed forces, business and government.

This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.

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.

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.