John Howard Griffin > Quotes

“Every fool in error can find a passage of scripture to back him up”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: "What in God's name are you doing to yourself?”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“I'm annoyed by those who love mankind but are discourteous to people.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“He who is less than just is less than man.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Humanity does not differ in any profound way; there are not essentially different species of human beings. If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Fear dims even the sunlight.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“For so long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man's good intentions toward his fellow man.”
― John Howard Griffin

“Existence nullified by men; reaffirmed by nature.”
― John Howard Griffin

“This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“They don't deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white..., they only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and leisure time, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning.”
― John Howard Griffin

“How can you render the duties of justice to men when they may destroy you?”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Turning off all the lights, I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I stood in the darkness before the mirror, my hand on the light switch. I forced myself to flick it on.
In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger--a fierce, bald, very dark Negro--glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me.
The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence.”
― John Howard Griffin

“for so long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man’s good intentions toward his fellow man.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.”
― John Howard Griffin

“In reality, the Us-and-Them or I-and-Thou dichotomies do not exist. There is only one universal We - one human family united by the capacity to feel compassion and to demand equal justice for all.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“I told him about my unsuccessful job hunting. He said it was all part of the pattern of economics - economic injustice.
'You take a young white boy. He can go though school and college with a real incentive. He knows he can make good money in any profession when he gets out. But can a Negro - in the South? No, I've seen many make brilliant grades in college. And yet when they come home in the summers to earn a little money, they have to do the most menial work. And even when they graduate it's a long hard pull. Most take postal jobs, or preaching or teaching jobs. This is the cream. What about the others , Mr. Griffin? A man knows no matter how hard he works , he's never going to quite manage...taxes and prices eat up more than he can earn. He can't see how he'll ever have a wife and children. The economic structure just doesn't permit it unless he's prepared to live down in poverty and have his wife work too. That's part of it. Our people aren't educated because they can't afford it or else they know education won't earn them the jobs it would a white men.”
― John Howard Griffin

“But there are differences. The social studies I’ve read …” “They don’t deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white,” I said. “They only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and less leisure, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don’t spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man’s conditioning.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Didn’t Shakespeare say something about ‘every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up’? He knew his religious bigots.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“However it might go, I should have no regrets. If I should be reduced to begging in the street, then I should enjoy the feel of pavement beneath my feet and the odors of asphalt and automobile exhausts. Good and bad fortune were equally attractive when viewed in such a context. Hunger was as interesting as satiety. A life without sight was as interesting as life with sight. Who was to say different? Society? The bulk of humanity?

They were living their first lives, cautiously aware that someday they would die. They had everything to lose. They could not take the risks. But I had been through death, had my insides burned out by it twice.

I was living a second life, freed of those cautious awarenesses.

I had nothing to lose. I could take all the risks.”
― John Howard Griffin, Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision

“We've reached a poor state when people are afraid that doing the decent and right thing is going to help the communist conspiracy.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“someone in a high place - the mayor, chief of police, or other official - would receive information that a neighboring city was already in flames and that carloads of armed black men were coming to attack this city. This happened in Cedar Rapids when Des Moines was allegedly in flames. It happened in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and in Fort Worth, Texas, when it was alleged that Oklahoma City was in flames and carloads were converging on those cities. It happened in Reno and other western cities, when Oakland, California, was supposed to be in flames. It happened in Roanoke when Richmond, Virginia, was supposed to be in flames.”
― John Howard Griffin, Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision

“I spent years," he told me, "studying the phenomenon of love."
"And I spend years studying the phenomenon of justice."
"At base, we spend years studying the same thing.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“We led strange, hidden lives. We were advocating one thing: that this country rid itself of the racism that prevented some citizens from living as fully functioning men and as a result dehumanized all men. We were advocating only that this country live up to its promises to all citizens. But since racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion - a great many people loathed us for knocking holes in these respectable guises. It was clear that we would have to live always under threat.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“DESEGREGATE THE BUSES WITH THIS 7 POINT PROGRAM:

1. Pray for guidance.
2. Be courteous and friendly.
3. Be neat and clean.
4. Avoid loud talk.
5. Do not argue.
6. Report incidents immediately.
7. Overcome evil with good.
Sponsored by Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance
Rev. A. L. Davis, Pres.
Rev. J. E. Poindexter, Secretary”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“This system of discrimination, an inculcated double standard, may vary in content from culture to culture, but it is always unjust. There are thousands of kinds of injustice but there is only one kind of justice - equal justice for all. To call for a little more justice, or a moderately gradual sort of justice, is to call for no justice. That is a simple truth.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied in all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful. If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man - alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“If virtue does not equal powers, powers will be misused.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me