“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey;”

“Nor could I fail to recall my friendship with Howard K. Beale, professor of American History at the University of North Carolina. There he was, one day in 1940, standing just outside my room in the men’s dormitory at St. Augustine’s, in his chesterfield topcoat, white silk scarf, and bowler hat, with his calling card in hand, perhaps looking for a silver tray in which to drop it. Paul Buck, whom he knew at Harvard, had told him to look me up. He wanted to invite me to his home in Chapel Hill to have lunch or dinner and to meet his family. From that point on we saw each other regularly.After I moved to Durham, he invited me each year to give a lecture on “The Negro in American Social Thought” in one of his classes. One day when I was en route to Beale’s class, I encountered one of his colleagues, who greeted me and inquired where I was going. I returned the greeting and told him that I was going to Howard Beale’s class to give a lecture. After I began the lecture I noticed that Howard was called out of the class. He returned shortly, and I did not give it another thought. Some years later, after we both had left North Carolina, Howard told me that he had been called out to answer a long-distance phone call from a trustee of the university who had heard that a Negro was lecturing in his class. The trustee ordered Beale to remove me immediately. In recounting this story, Beale told me that he had said that he was not in the habit of letting trustees plan his courses, and he promptly hung up. Within a few years Howard accepted a professorship at the University of Wisconsin. A favorite comment from Chapel Hill was that upon his departure from North Carolina, blood pressures went down all over the state.”

“Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. "I've got a sudden silly whim that we should take an oath I must have read when I was a youngster in some old book... the words have suddenly come back to me. They go like this: We (and then we say our own names), Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes, that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it in and warm it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser than the foolish nor more cunning than the simple, and that we will remember that he who rides the Wind needs must go where his Steed carries him.”

“There is a difference between being broke and being poor. Being broke is a temporary economic situation, but being poor is disabling frame of mind, and a depressed condition of one's spirit, and we must all vow to never, ever be poor again.”

“We need to send our words out in the direction we want them to go. In other words, we need to start talking victory when we’re staring at defeat. We need to start talking healing when we’re feeling sick. We need to start blessing and prosperity when we don’t have anything. We need to speak about marching when we feel like quitting.”

“Sometimes everything you know in the world turns out to be a lie. But at the end of the day the lie isn’t what matters, it’s what you do after you tell it. If you work hard enough you can make it true.”

“And your actual job isn't to educate the public; it's to stroke the collective clit of our consciousness until we all become so cum-numb to the world that we just chase the high and can't see the lows we're all wallowing in.”