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.

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

A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

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.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.