Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that. He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at yet higher and higher tempos.

You have to get an individual who's willing to actually struggle with the system to change it. As long as you have people who - to make substantive changes, to make infrastructure changes.

Alas, we have not yet the power to render completely sterile or make impossible the errors and lies which will merely be America being itself rather than its unconvincing promise.

Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction, and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness.

A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.