... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.

The importance of a lost romantic vision should not be underestimated. In such a vision is power as well as joy. In it is meaning.Life is flat, barren, zestless, if one can find one's lost vision nowhere.

... most Southerners of my parents' era were raised to feel that it wasn't respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn't elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.

... the constructive power of an image is not measured in terms of its truth, but of the love it inspires.

Two great areas of deafness existed in the South: White Southerners had no ears to hear that which threatened their Dream. And colored Southerners had none to hear that which could reduce their anger.

Our minorities alone are in a position to know what the fathers of our democracy were talking about.

If we love-and-serve an ideal we reach backward in time to its inception and forward to its consummation. To grow is sometimes to hurt; but who would return to smallness?