It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.

The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

The world of shabby gentility is like no other its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.

To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.