You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets.

I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that is precisely why they are so precious.

Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.

To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.

I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.

Serious history was the West, and the West was white.

She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers.

I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.

His body jerks twice as the bullets hit him. I scream, but no sound leaves my mouth. I'm frozen in pure terror.

I tried to think of what my father would tell me. 'Don't let any boy give you shit.' But he'd never said how we should go about preventing this.

Tension is a prerequisite for creative living.

Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.

A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America

‎Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving?

I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay.

Another reality is a whisper away.

You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

If ye love me keep my commandments