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"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being or a state of grace--not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."

"It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant--birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so--and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths--change in the sense of renewal."

"We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare... Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster."

"For it would seem that a certain category of exceptions never failed to make the world worse--that category, precisely, for whom power is more real than love. And yet power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it."

"Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn't, as far as could be discovered, read, either--they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes."

“White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way.”