absolute power is corrupting

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

One walks along a street and strays unknowingly from one’s path; one then looks up and suddenly for those familiar landmarks of orientation, and, seeing none, one feels lost. Panic drapes the look of the...

Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires

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...

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books…

If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a...

I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em…

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a...

Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of...

If you’ve a notion of what man’s heart is, wouldn’t you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man’s frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself...

The world of most men is given to them by their culture..

there are times when life’s ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

Maybe man is nothing in particular,’ Cross said gropingly. ‘Maybe that’s the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams...

He lay still, his bloodshot eyes staring blankly before him, and drifted into dreams of his problems, compulsively living out dialogues, summing up emotional scenes with his mother, Dot, and his friends. Repeatedly he chided...

…the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by...

You can’t make me do nothing but die!

I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of “Uncle Tom’s Children”. When the review of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awful...

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no...

Every decent man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over...

….I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.

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...

Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.

The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long...

…it was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with other...