“I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.”

“If you will remain at rest and hold your peace, then the battle is not yours, but the battle is the Lord’s.”

“you truly can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

“Prison is a still point in a turning world, and it is very easy to remain in the same place in jail while the world moves on.”

“They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don't want to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America's happy, faceless marketplace; and we're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-- although that's what we tell ourselves-- but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don't know who I am? I'm an individual!”

“Life is not fair get used to used to it”

“There are no limitations to the mind except those that we acknowledge.”

“Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life - all life - is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.”

“It is not for you, a son of Adam, to know what faults a star can commit.”

“The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”

“The cost of freedom is always high, but people have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.”

“In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.”

“Never again should you wonder what you have to be thankful for.”

“The more seriously you take your growth, the more seriously your people will take you.”

“The wheels of [God’s] mercy and justice move quietly and silently, but they do move.”