This is my homeland no one can kick me out.
Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
The university is one of various funding structures by which people who want to do theoretical work stay alive, the same way that people go to grad school, not because they think it's going to change the world but because there's no patron system anymore, and they need some scaffolding of support while they're trying to figure out how they can proceed in their lives. I think that's utterly legit. A lot of our better theorists and thinkers, that's what the university is for them.
I do believe we slander Christ when we think we are to draw the people by something else but the preaching of Christ crucified.
I think all Americans need to recognize that, as tragic and horrible as slavery was, as big an economic shadow as it cast, the one thing it didn't do was strip people of their humanity. And I wish that all of us were as strong as the people that walked down those steps and got on those boats.
I never seemed to fit in. But it made me try to strive for things ten times harder.