“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!”

“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.”

“Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.”

“Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated”

“I missed the joy of seeing our children grow and change. I thank God for watching over them during those years.”

“In Houston, Texas, a man was born again in one of our meetings. He owned a liquor store. The next morning he had a sign on the front of his door saying, “Out of business.”

“Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem when all the odds were against him. Determination and persistence pulsate through your bloodline.”

“God has a great life planned for you.”

“And the moujiks? How do the moujiks die?”

“If we really want to love we must learn how to forgive."

“Wenn man zwei Stunden lang mit einem Mädchen zusammensitzt, meint man, es wäre eine Minute. Sitzt man jedoch eine Minute auf einem heißen Ofen, meint man, es wären zwei Stunden. Das ist Relativität.”

“One legislator accused me of having a 19th-century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an 18th-century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law-abiding citizens should be one of the government’s primary concerns.”

“Success is not success without a successor.”

“Picture what could happen if a wife - instead of calling all her friends to complain about her husband - prayed to God to radically and outrageously bless him?”

“One of the main weaknesses of mankind is the average man’s familiarity with the word “impossible.” He knows all the rules which will NOT work. He knows all the things which CANNOT be done.”