Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
You cannot fix what you will not face.
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.
Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.
You took the best, so why not take the rest?
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
I will no longer take anyone’s word for my experience.
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.