“...when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future-and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the Western populations, struggling to ho...”

“I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it mu...”

“One of the things, though, that has always afflicted the American reality and the American vision is this aversion to history. History is not something you read about in a book, history is not even...”

“And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.”

“That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That's how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwis...”

“[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simplicity, it occurs to me, it has occurred to me more than once, in my somewhat stormy life, simplic...”

“But how are you going to get out, into the world of other people? That is your problem now, if I may hazard a guess to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self tha...”

“They thought they were so different, Flame and Ice. Enemies always do. The Soviets and the West, they were the same. They looked at each other and saw monsters; they looked at themselves and saw me...”

“In the course of a marriage, one accommodates the other.”

“Knowing the self is the biggest truth. If we find the truth within, we have found God.”

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”

“What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.”