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"Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge-revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
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Personal Development

"William Cowper said that God made the country, and man made the town. If it was the opposite, there would be no country; because town can be created from the country but the country cannot be created from the town!"
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Personal Development

"Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it's an almost losing battle against it."
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Personal Development

"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."
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Personal Development

"Saying someone is religious is heard in most of America as a compliment, a reassuring affirmation that someone will be moral, ethical, and after a few glasses of wine, a freak in the bedroom."
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Personal Development

"Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities."
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Personal Development

"Shyness is a luxury reserved for those who are above the poverty line. To a beggar, being shy is deadly."
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Personal Development

"When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they're not really concerned about him, they're concerned about their daughter's tummy."
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Personal Development

"The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under."
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Personal Development

"Every person should decide for himself how happy, or unhappy, our society might be."
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"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."
Experience

"I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."
Philosophy

"The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic-a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall."
Psychology

"It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian."
Age

"The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black."
People

"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."
Power

"It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless."
Man

"In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity-and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top."
Governance

"No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other."
Society

"You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity."
Society
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