"It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

"People can cry much easier than they can change."

"People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."

"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?"

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory."

"Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of idealogy [sic], that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art etc."

"Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly."

"Ideas often kindle each other, like electrical sparks."

"...it was always our view that in order to attain this [proletarian revolution] and the other far more important aims of the future social revolution, the working class must first take possession of the organised political power of the state and by its aid crush the resistance of the capitalist class and organise society anew."

"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon - authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire..."

"The proletarians, driven to despair, will seize the torch which Stephens has preached to them; the vengeance of the people will come down with a wrath of which the rage of 1795 gives no true idea. The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged."

"All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm... The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward."

"One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?"

"The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist."

"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."

"If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living."

"Competition permits the capitalist to deduct from the price of labour power that which the family earns from its own little garden or field; the workers are compelled to accept any piece wages offered to them, because otherwise they would get nothing at all, and they could not live from the products of their small-scale agriculture alone, and because, on the other hand, it is just this agriculture and landownership which chains them to the spot and prevents them from looking around for other employment."

"By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live."

"In 10 years, this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation - the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half annexed already socially - hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern."