If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority?
The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
If it was once again one against forty-eight, then I am very sorry for the forty-eight.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
It’s not the same to talk of bulls as to be in the bullring.
I do not love strife, because I have always found that in the end each remains of the same opinion.
Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful, and always, she had to admit, interesting.
If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
To die for the revolution is a one-shot deal; to live for the revolution means taking on the more difficult commitment of changing our day-to-day life patterns.
Those of us who have the situation in Lebanon in perspective and know exactly how to plot a gay-rights campaign are usually morons. We snap at our children when they have innocent homework questions. We don’t notice when our lover has a deadline. We forget to call our best friend back when she’s just had root canal. Homework, root canal, and deadlines are the important things in life, and only when we have these major dramas taken care of can we presume to look at the larger questions.
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
If I am to eliminate my own sufferings, I must act in the knowledge that I exist in dependent relationships with other human beings and the whole of nature.
Even a purely moral act that has no hope of immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.
The status quo sits on society like fat on cold chicken soup and it’s quite content to be what it is. Unless someone comes along to stir things up there just won’t be change.
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
