"The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now."

"The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

"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."

"The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all."

"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law."

"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."

"No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it."

"The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions."

"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."

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side."

"The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever."

"The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment."

"To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger."

"I want to be an honest man and a good writer."

"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it."

"Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock."

"Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours."

"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."

"The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others."

"Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?"

"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."

"That's the kind of ad I like, facts, facts, facts."

"Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch."

"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."

"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose."

"Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks."

"Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it."

"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 making of bread."

"Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable."

"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."