Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty – necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.
Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.
Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.
This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare – but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.
There is something terribly radical about believing that one’s own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform.
The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.
An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
There was no room in God’s army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God’s will. Let the church cry amen to this!
When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
We can make America what America must become.