The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.

It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.

Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.

Every single progressive education fad of the past thirty years has hurt poor black children.

A black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate.

My experience in life tells me that the values that are now being labeled 'conservative' are the only way that blacks can get ahead.

Freedom always carries a burden of proof, always throws us back on ourselves.

Liberalism has become a moral vaccine that immunizes people against stigmatization.

My honest opinion is that blacks have to fight much harder for their individuality than whites do.

I would love to see us, as blacks, get to the place where we say, 'I'm not going to play race games with you. Here I am. This is who I am. Take it or leave it.'

If you are a minority, it is important that you have legal ways to defend yourself in the society in which you live.

Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.

Everyone should have health insurance? I say everyone should have health care. I'm not selling insurance.

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.

I hate playing pretty or sane people. Most people are not attractive or all there.

Vice and virtue chiefly imply the relation of our actions to men in this world; sin and holiness rather imply their relation to God and the other world.

Today we are all speeding under the golden arms of the arches into our city, into our lives, into the world that is a stream of information, ceaselessly collected and projected.

We respond to healing grace by giving it away.

I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting.