I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
I can’t be a pessimist, because I am alive.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
If the word integration means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.
He may be a very nice man. But I haven’t got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he’s got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.