The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.

It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.

A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.

The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.

To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.