“The man of courage is not the man who did not face adversity. The man of courage is the man who faced adversity and spoke to it. The man of courage tells adversity, "You're trespassing and I give y...”

“Mama's antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom, but to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I r...”

“If God needs to condemn anything to hell, it ought to be the idea of social death. Every day we commit an act of revolution, an act of treason, against a system that was never meant to guarantee ou...”

“We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.”

“But i am a black man whose black mama's body and spirit were terrorized by another black man's hands and words. Sexism and patriarchy are not part of the revolution. I am a gender-maneuvering gay b...”

“Your letter reminds me that any love that necessitates deception is not love. It doesn't matter if that supposed love is institutional or personal.”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”