An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!

There exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

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 [Americans] have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.