There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.