Quotes by John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light...”

“How can you render the duties of justice to men when you're afraid they'll be so unaware of justice they may destroy you? ...especially since their attitude toward their own race is a destructive one.”

“He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.”

“The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those w...”

“The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it.”

“If virtue does not equal powers, powers will be misused.”

“It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me.”

“It was the ghetto. I had seen them before from the high altitude of one who could look down and pity. Now I belonged here and the view was different. A first glance told it all. Here it was pennies...”

“Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty”

“In the context of today, this WAS heroism.”

“We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk , were suddenly elevated in status by this man's misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and th...”

“We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.”

“We need a conversion of morals," the elderly man said. "Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint-some enlightened common sense. Otherwise, we'll never have t...”

“I learned a strange thing... that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word "nigger" leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and it always stings. And always it casts the person usin...”

“...[A] lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can-mostly in pleasure,and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to l...”

“Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this "separation" may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they...”

“If the judgement makes the law and not the law directs the judgement, it is impossible there should be such a thing as an illegal judgement given.”

“A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the mortal duty to will only that which is good.”

“He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.”

“All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy.”