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

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.

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.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

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.

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