If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.
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 blind play of social forces.
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 sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
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.
A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man’s consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars.
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 the earth and spitting forth his venom of death!
I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.
The world of most men is given to them by their culture..
Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.
They argued about the weather, sports, sex, war, race, politics, and religion; neither of them knew the subjects they debated, but it seemed that the less they knew the better the could argue.
If you posses enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
…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 people.
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
….I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.
Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires
I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em…
If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.
A writer who hasn’t written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.
The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
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.
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.