“Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.”

“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.”

“When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.”

“Now, one hears from a long time ago that "white is merely a state of mind." I add to that, white is a moral choice. It's up to you to be as white as you want to be and pay the price of that ticket. You cannot tell a black man by the color of skin, either. But this is a democracy.”

“The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.”

“People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.”

“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. ”