“Never has there been a time when men tried so desperately to have fun as they do today.”

“It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.”

“Yes: if only a hundredth of the efforts spent in curing diseases were spent in curing debauchery, disease would long ago have ceased to exist, whereas now all efforts are employed, not in extirpating debauchery, but in favoring it, by assuring the harmlessness of the consequences.”

“You have the legs and other also have it; they have the brain and you have it! Stop thinking you can't transact the business that others can. If you do, you are raising your inflation rate!”

“At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“The darker and richer the colors, the more unique and wonderful the fruits, the more power-packed nutrition they contain.”

“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”

“When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart.

“What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.”

“If now we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten how to see God in one another.”

“I discovered for the first time people of my own age firmly aligned with the liberation struggle, who were prepared, despite their relative privilege, to sacrifice themselves of the cause of the oppressed.” 

“VERSíCULO PARA RECORDAR: «Todo comenzó en él y para los propósitos de él». Colosenses 1:16b (PAR). PREGUNTA PARA CONSIDERAR: A pesar de toda la publicidad que me rodea, ¿qué puedo hacer para recordar que la vida consiste en vivirla para Dios y no para mí mismo?

“Before GOD,no god,after him,there will be no GOD.”

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”