top of page
.png){kind=small}
"You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. (...) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends?"
Standard
Customized
More
"We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Not all 'whites' are racists. Not all racists are 'white."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A 'black' man who draws a 'black' person with big lips is called observant. A 'white' man who does the same is called a racist."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A vision of cultural homogeneity that seeks to deflect attention away from or even excuse the oppressive, dehumanizing impact of white supremacy on the lives of black people by suggesting black people are racist too indicates that the culture remains ignorant of what racism really is and how it works. It shows that people are in denial. Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. (...) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly."
Beauty
"The paradox of education is precisely this; that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."
Education
"It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless."
Man
"The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic-a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall."
Psychology
"Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins."
Adventure
"Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead."
Motivation
"The necessity, then, of those "lesser breeds without the law-those wogs, barbarians, niggers-is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply "spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again, leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest."
Society
"Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation."
Nature
"If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go."
Inspirational
"He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear."
Life
bottom of page