I sometimes think, with despair, that Americans will swallow whole any political speech whatever—we’ve been doing very little else, these last, bad years

It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one another.)

Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.

Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impassable with our bodies the corridors to the gas chamber. For if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger’s presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

The root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much had the white manas simply as want the out of his way,and, more than that,out of his children's way. The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind.

A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State.