I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.