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If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
As for one’s wits, it is just not true that one can live by them—not, that is, if one wishes really to live.
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
“I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?”
If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.
That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words.
