The Devil Finds Work

while His eye might be on the sparrow, mine had to be on the hawk.

my countrymen were my enemy, and I had already begun to hate them from the bottom of my heart.

white people took into their hands could scarcely even be called vengeance, it was something less and something more.

the despised and rejected are menaced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are therefore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not.

Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the “vital interest” of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child

responsible for their slaughter and enslavement

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo

Beneath the resonance of the word, revolution, thundered the word, revenge.

I hadn’t yet really accepted, or understood, that I was black and also because I knew (and didn’t want her to know, although, of course, she did)

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.