The Fire Next Time (Vintage International, 2013 edition)

Their wordsBut it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.

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Their wordsIt is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

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Their wordsYou were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

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Their wordsKnow whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

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Their wordsThe really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them.

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Their wordsPlease try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.

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Their wordsFor this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.

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Their wordsTo act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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Their wordsYou know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.

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Their wordsBut the Negro's experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. His own condition is overwhelming proof that white people do not live by these standards.

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Their wordsWhoever debases others is debasing himself.

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Their wordsLove takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

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Their wordsBut what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me?

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Their wordsWhite people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.

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Their wordsTo be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

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Their wordsEverything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

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Their wordsIf the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

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Their wordsBut time has passed, and in that time the Christian world has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable.

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Their wordsFreedom is hard to bear.

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Their wordsLife is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

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Their wordsPerhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

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