All racists are irresponsible.

No man is a devil in his own mind.

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.

Education is indoctrination if you're white -- subjugation if you're black.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.

It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it -- the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress -- from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves. The loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

Recognizing a problem doesn't always bring a solution, but until we recognize that problem, there can be no solution.

Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.