Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

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

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

Exquisite beauty resides rather in the female form than face, where it is also more lasting.

I have realized that my real self is a greater entity than any possible post or title.

You cannot strengthen one by weakening another; and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the leg of a giant.

To offer a man unsolicited advice is to presume that he doesn't know what to do or that he can't do it on his own.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.

A man has to choose. This is where lies his strength: in the power of his decisions. If you choose to follow the path of your dreams, commit yourself to it. Accept your path.

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!

I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English.