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.

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.

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

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.

Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.

We are all addicts in various stages of degradation where I live on the Upper West Side, some to heroin, some to small dogs, and some to the New York Times. The heroin is cut, the dogs are paranoid, and the Times cheats by skimping on the West Coast ball scores. No matter, each of us goes upon the street solely in pursuit of his own particular curse.