It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
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The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.
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There is a ''sanctity'' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
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The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
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The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war love is a growing up.
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Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
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The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
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Beyond talent lie all the usual words discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
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Rich Palm Beach clients all wanted the same kind of different thing.
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
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Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.
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The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
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The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.
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It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.
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For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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