Success is the power to acquire whatever one demands of life without violating the rights of others.

No greater wrong can ever be done than to put a good man at the mercy of a bad, while telling him not to defend himself or his fellows; in no way can the success of evil be made surer or quicker.

If you tried to right all the wrongs in the world you'd exhaust yourself in under an hour.

truth, she didn't care for rules of any sort; rules made little sense to a person who had grown up in a world without compassion or pity, where there was no moral code by which to abide.

Haylin was given a good talking-to by the headmaster and made to write a paper about workers' rights, which he considered a privilege rather than a punishment. He was obligated to write ten pages, and handed in a tome of nearly fifty pages instead, duly footnoted, quoting from Thomas Paine and FDR. He couldn't wait for the next decade. Everything would change in the sixties, he told Franny. And, if they were lucky, they would then be free.

he thought of Jesus as a great teacher, a rebel who refused to see the poor and disenfranchised mistreated.

Why should the killers of the world be the future and not us?

Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights.

The defeat that had frightened her in the faces of black men was the defeat of black forever defined by white.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday school class and grin for television over their victory, i.e. , the death of four small black girls.

Instead all the women [at the National Black Feminist Organization] understood that we gathered together to assure understanding among black women, and that understanding among women is not a threat to anyone who intends to treat women fairly.