The question in crisis or ordeal is not: Are you going to be an extremist? The question is: What kind of extremist are you going to be?

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely.

Belief in Some One's right to punish you is the fate of all children in Judaic-Christian culture. But nowhere else, perhaps, have the rich seed-beds of Western homes found such a growing climate for guilt as is produced in the South by the combination of a warm moist evangelism and racial segregation.

The point of life is to find the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality.

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: It is the only way we can leave the future open.