My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth. That ain't easy. There are ...so few truth-speaking traditions in this society in which the myth of "Western civilization" has claimed the allegiance of so many. We have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works, that it releases the Spirit and that it is a joyous thing. We live in a part of the world, for example, that equates criticism with assault, that equates social responsibility with naive idealism, that defines the unrelenting pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as fanaticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are alr...eady taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is... simple. You knock a man down and then have him arrested for assault. You kill a man and then hang the corpse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,--and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not... equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever reality reinforces a child's fantasied dangers, the child will have more difficulty in overcoming them...So, while parent...s may not regard a spanking as a physical attack or an assault on a child's body, the child may regard it as such, and experience it as a confirmation of his fears that grown-ups under certain circumstances can really hurt you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The treatment of the incident of the assault upon the sailors of the Baltimore is so conciliatory and friendly that I am of the op...inion that there is a good prospect that the differences growing out of that serious affair can now be adjusted upon terms satisfactory to this Government by the usual methods and without special powers from Congress.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault... upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense sy...llables.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »