“New York!" he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream.”

“a delegate shout out from the floor: Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes...”

“Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.”

“It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they wer...”

“The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.”

“You're a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it b...”

“The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving...”

“Senator John Stennis:The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man. ... It freed my soul.”

“The greatest evil in our country today is...ignorance...We need to be taught to study rather than to believe.”

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”

“We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to resc...”

“The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”

“Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must at that moment become the center of the universe.”