A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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.
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.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
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.
The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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.
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.
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.
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.