86 Quotes by John Howard Griffin

We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.

Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this "separation" may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they truly speak as equals and in which the white man will no longer load every phrase with unconscious suggestions that he has something to "concede" to black men or that he wants to help black men "overcome" their blackness.

We need a conversion of morals," the elderly man said. "Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint-some enlightened common sense. Otherwise, we'll never have the right answers...

I believe that before we can truly dialogue with one another we must first perceive intellectually, and then at the profoundest emotiomal level, that there is no Other - that the Other is simply Oneself in all the significant essentials.This alone is the key that can unlock the prison of culture. It will neutralize the poisons of the stereotype that allow men to go on benevolently justifying their abuses against humanity.

Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty

In the context of today, this WAS heroism.

To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.

If the judgement makes the law and not the law directs the judgement, it is impossible there should be such a thing as an illegal judgement given.

A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the mortal duty to will only that which is good.