"I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter."

"I am not a pessimist. I am a witness."

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be."

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers."