Quotes by Richard Wright, Native Son

“You can't make me do nothing but die!”

“He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they w...”

“They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind...”

“Every decent man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over the earth a...”

“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”

“I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...”

“The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.”

“Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by th...”

“If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two...”