When we lose love, we lose also our identification with the universe and with eternal values--an identification which alone makesit possible for us to lay our lives on the altar for what we believe.

Our minorities alone are in a position to know what the fathers of our democracy were talking about.

... the constructive power of an image is not measured in terms of its truth, but of the love it inspires.

Serviceis love in action, love "made flesh"; service is the body, the incarnation of love. Love is the impetus, service the act, and creativity the result with many by-products.

To grow is sometimes to hurt, but who would return to smallness?

A man's real and deep feelings are surely those which he acts upon when challenged, not those which, mellow-eyed and soft-voiced, he spouts in easy times.

... in 1950 a very large slice of the white South stood at the crossroads in its attitude toward its colored citizens and [was] psychologically capable of turning either way.

If we love-and-serve an ideal we reach backward in time to its inception and forward to its consummation. To grow is sometimes to hurt; but who would return to smallness?

A mechanism of some kind stands between us and almost every act of our lives.

I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn't love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country.

We become what we deeply desire and think about most of the time

Is there any pure pleasure like praying?

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.

Media is a big problem around the world, it's powerful and can abuse its power.

I miss everything that makes up Panama. I don't have a preference. I love my country.

I think marrying somebody who's not a celebrity, it just takes a lot of the pressure off.

That is why I strongly believe we should working in Congress to make America a better place to run a business by reducing the costly burdens of bureaucracy and red tape.

I don't claim to say, "All black women are like me," because they're not.

Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent.