“I would like to flood South Africa with black personages of all sorts of persuasions: writers, educators, businessmen, you name it. If you are black and have any clout at all, I would like to see you go to South Africa and look for yourself and come back and try to use the tools that you have at your command to try and help the brothers down there.”

“The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight.”

“I know I could never forgive myself if I elected to live without humane purpose, without trying to help the poor and unfortunate, without recognizing that perhaps the purest joy in life comes with trying to help others.”

“...I spent many, many hours in...libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were.”

“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.”

“Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.”

“He that commends me to mine own content Commends me to the thing I cannot get. I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself: So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.”

“When I was at home I was in a better place”