Hence, there is no such thing as an absolute objectivity of attitude. The most rigorously determined attitude of objectivity is, at best, relative. We are human; we are the slaves of our assumptions, of time and circumstance; we are the victims of our passions and illusions; and the most our critics can ask of us is this: Have you taken your passions, your illusions, your time, and your circumstance into account?
Those Garveyites I knew could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them, and I pitied them too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Europe, that their lives were alien to the mores of the natives of Africa, that they were people of the West and would for ever be so until they either merged with the West or perished.
In all my life – though surrounded by many people – I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with another human being and, not having had any, I did not miss it. I made no demands whatever upon others.
He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes.
The cross the preacher had told him about was bloody, not flaming; meek, not militant. It had made him feel awe and wonder, not fear and panic. It had made him want to kneel and cry, but this cross made him want to curse and kill.
In the old days we were concerned with mobs, with thousands of men running amuck in the streets. The mob has conquered completely. When the mob has grown so vast that you cannot see it, then it is everywhere.
Then, first of all, let us admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity. Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction...
The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances life by his prolonged concentration upon it, while the politician emphasizes the impersonal aspect of life by his attempts to fit men into groups.
Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be quit of them ; but even after obeying, after killing, they still ruled him. He was their property, heart and soul, body and blood ; what they did claimed every atom of him, sleeping and waking...
Knowing almost nothing about books or serious magazines, intellectually he is a creature of the movie house, where he is an easy prey to fantasies concocted by Hollywood for the gullible. He.
How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?
These conditions reflected the failures of modern civilization – the death of genuine spiritual values and traditions, the harsh ness of economic greed and exploitation, the avarice for glittering material goods that, in a culture of consumerism, ultimately possessed the possessor.
How constantly and overwhelmingly the advertisements, radios, newspapers and movies play upon us! But in thinking of them remember that to many they are tokens of mockery.
Toward no one in the world did he feel any fear now, for he knew that fear was useless; and toward no one in the world did he feel any hate now, for he knew that hate would not help him. Though.
They wouldn’t let me live and I killed. Maybe it ain’t fair to kill, and I reckon I really didn’t want to kill.
I was seized by doubt. Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror that lay ahead.
Maybe I would’ve been all right if I could’ve done something I wanted to do. I wouldn’t be scared then. Or mad, maybe. I wouldn’t be always hating folks; and maybe I’d feel at home, sort of.
I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.
Public peace is the act of public trust; it is the faith that all are secure and will remain secure.
You’re trying to believe in yourself. And every time you try to find a way to live, your own mind stands in the way. You know why that is? It’s because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind. His feelings drag him forward and his mind, full of what others say about him, tells him to go back.