I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.
Books are humanity in print.
Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
The most important thing in my life is that trying to ameliorate, redeem, the image in particular of African American men, or Black men - I don't really even like that term, "African American," because we're Black people.
Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities.
As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.
While writing, I'll go anywhere I find that is quiet, has no internet. I have a big internet problem.