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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child canno...  
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and ...  
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize al...  
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is ...  
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensi...  
Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it...  
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.  
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but t...  
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're bl...  
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root f...  
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you...  
Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by...  
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man w...  
He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that o...  
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but...  
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly...  
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly...   Patriotism
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.  
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you c...  
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biolog...  
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the ...  
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they s...  
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a coun...  
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most wer...  
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably r...  
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is ...   Love
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven...  
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we c...   Love
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing els...  
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and...  
Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term na...  
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, eac...  
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: f...  
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heav...  
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; f...  
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be change...   Change
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but ...  
One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying ...  
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.   History
People can cry much easier than they can change.  
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed...  
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised...  
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we w...  
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for other...  
Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling del...  
That's the kind of ad I like, facts, facts, facts.  
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alik...  
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested wi...  
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go ...  
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing ...  
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.  
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or shoul...  
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to bec...  
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuse...  
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an inti...  
The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of th...  
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate th...  
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was...  
The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everythin...  
The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishme...  
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows h...  
There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this world: ...  
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvat...  
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing...  
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.  
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be ...  
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life...  
Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person t...  
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn'...  
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to st...  
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the w...