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

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.

A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.

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.

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

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.

The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.