Quotes from John Howard Griffin

All human beings face the same fundamental problems of loving and of suffering, of striving toward human aspirations for themselves and their children, of simply being and inevitably dying. These are the basic truths in all people, the common denominators of all cultures and all races and all ethnic categories. In

We need a conversion of morals, the elderly man said. Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint-some enlightened common sense. Otherwise, we'll never have the right answers...

The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him. The

It's a vicious cycle, Mr. Griffin, and I don't know how we'll get out of it. They put us low and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low we can't deserve our rights.

There is no justice without truth. P.D. East

I learned a strange thing - that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word n***** always leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and always it stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance.

Though not all, by any means, were so open about their purposes, all of them showed us how they felt about the Negro, the idea that we were people of such morality that nothing could offend us. These men, young and old, however, were less offensive than the ones who treated us like machines, as though we had no human existence whatsoever. When they paid me, they looked as though I were a stone or a post. They looked and saw nothing.

But since racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion - a great many people loathed us for knocking holes in these respectable guises. It was realization that racial injustice was for the good of all society, not just for the good of the oppressed.

The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him

One can scarcely conceive the full horror of it unless one is a parent who takes a close look at his children and then asks himself how he would feel if a group of men should come to his door and tell him they had decided - for reasons of convenience to them - that his children's lives would henceforth be restricted, their world smaller, their educational opportunities less, their future mutilated

I told them good night and returned to my room, less lonely and warmed by the brief contact with others like me who felt the need to be reassured that an eye could show something besides suspicion or hate

measure up - disillusion us by showing

There are thousands of kinds of injustice but there is only one kind of justice - equal justice for all. To call for a little more justice, or a moderately gradual sort of justice, is to call for no justice. That is a simple truth.

I remained in my room more and more each day. The situation in Montgomery was so strange I decided to try passing back into white society.

him dumfounded as he chanted the Gregorian