“I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”

“Man can create nothing which he does not first conceive in the form of an impulse of thought.”

“If you read history you will find that the Christians begin the most for the present world are just the ones that thought the most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot. in the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark one Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so in effective in this. And that Heaven and you'll get the earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you'll get neither.”

“Learning to love unselfishly is not an easy task. It runs counter to our self-centered nature. That’s why we’re given a lifetime to learn it.”

“We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."

“Although the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing.”

“If you're explaining, you're losing.”

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they've got to be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (...) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”

“God has created us to be different from one another, and He has done it on purpose. Each of us meets a need, and we are all part of God’s overall plan. When we try to be like others, we lose ourselves, and we grieve the Holy Spirit. God wants us to fit into His plan, not to feel pressured trying to fit into everyone else’s plans. It is all right to be different.”

“... one doesn't need telepathy to read your intentions.”

“Every adversity, every unpleasant circumstance, every failure, and every physical pain carries with it the seed of an equivalent benefit.”

“Preparing for the future must begin, as always, with our children. We need to set for them new and more rigorous goals.”

“A prayerless Christian is a powerless Christian.”

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.”

“What makes journalist so fascinating, and biography so interesting [is] the struggle to answer that single question: 'What's he like?”