Great Throughts Treasury

"Never be afraid to sit awhile and think."

"Seem like God don’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile."

"The thing that makes you exceptional - if you are at all - is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

"There is always something left to love. And if you haven't learned that, you ain't learned nothing."

"Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?"

"A status not freely chosen or entered into by an individual or a group is necessarily one of oppression and the oppressed are by their nature (i.e., oppressed) forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition."

"I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and--I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations."

"Then isn't this rather all a false funeral? Can't it help you to see that there is something wrong when all the dreams in this house-good or bad-had to depend on something that might never have happened if a man had not died? We always say at home: Accident was at the first and will be at the last a poor tree from which the fruits of life may bloom."

"It's all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don't accept. It's not important. I am not going out and commit crimes or be immoral because I don't believe in God. I don't even think about it. It's just that I get so tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is not God! There is only Man, and it's he who makes miracles!"

"'It's dangerous, son.' 'What's dangerous?' 'When a man goes outside his house to look for peace."