Death at an Early Age Quotes

“All white people, I think, are implicated in these things so long as we participate in America in a normal way and attempt to go on leading normal lives while any one race is being cheated and tormented. But I now believe that we will probably go on leading our normal lives, and will go on participating in our nation in a normal way, unless there comes a time where Negroes can compel us by methods of extraordinary pressure to interrupt our pleasure.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age

“But many human beings do take pleasure in inflicting pain on others, and those who have the least to be proud of or to be happy about are often the ones who take that pleasure most.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age

“I had a hard time with... the problem of being honest and of confronting openly the extent to which I was compromised by going along with things that were abhorrent and by accepting as moderately reasonable or unavoidably troublesome things which, if they were inflicted on children of my own, I would have condemned savagely.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age

“It is the comfortable people, by and large - those like the Reading Teacher - who make the decisions in our society. It is the people who those decisions are going to affect who are expected to stand quietly, and watch patiently, and wait.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age

“The slowness of change is always respectable and reasonable in the eyes of the ones who are only watching; it is a different matter for the ones who are in pain.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age