[There is a] no-win decision that innumerable people make, or try to make, or try to put off making daily: Whether to give up the ...job, the place, the people, the future one holds dear, denying one's own mental capacities, independence, and desires (what are left of them, what one remembers of them) just to get away. They will find themselves disgusting if they let their tormentor get his way, not ... by touching their body ... but by forcing them to flee, to change anything they would not have changed if they were free to keep it: their white collar career or their cash register at the supermarket, it doesn't matter in the slightest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class th...at has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat.... They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious.... They are scum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban m...asses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since I came to Virginia in July, I have not shaved; for weeks at a time I have slept in all clothes except boots (occasionally in... boots and sometimes with spurs), a half dozen times on the ground without shelter, once on the snow. I have wore no white clothing (shirts, drawers, etc.) for four months; no collar or neckerchief or tie of any sort for two months; and have not been the least unwell until since I have taken winter quarters here in a comfortable house. Now I have but a slight cold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only the white, tremendous foam of the street has any importance, The new white flowers that are beginning to shoot up about ...now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Other men wear white suits in summer and it doesn't seem to bother them. But my white suit seems to be a little whiter than theirs.... I think also that it may have something written on the back of it, although I can't find it when I take the suit off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am so tired of taking to others translating my life for the deaf, the blind,... the "I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges to live it" white women the "I want to live my white life with Third World women's style and keep my skin class privileges" dykesLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... two great areas of deafness existed in the South: White Southerners had no ears to hear that which threatened their Dream. And... colored Southerners had none to hear that which could reduce their anger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »