“The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself.”

“All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward.”

“What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?”

“The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.”

“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 ...”

“We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”

“The problem is this: nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a sup...”

“More than the disappearing trees and roses, its the human tendency to suppress the Natural Voice of the Natures Man which is sorrowful.”