It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.

Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.

There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.

To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.