Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
— James Baldwin
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
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.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
