We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helpl...essly and forever, contains the other--male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty--necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who... have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison our...selves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify wit...h themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, ...that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the v...esture of his adopted land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and... to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The reco...very of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievments must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and w...hat we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »