A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

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.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

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

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

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