Quotes About Progress

In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.

The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over.

It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next—one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.

My progress report concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom is discouraging. I lack certain indispensable aptitudes. Furthermore, it appears that I packed the wrong things.

I suppose this to mean that the song is still needed, still has work to do.

The paradox, and a fearful paradox it is, is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere on any continent as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one's past--one's history--is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.

in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand

To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro's past be used? The unprecedented price demanded—and at this embattled hour of the world's history—is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.

I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people van be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.

white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart—or, as they like to say, progress.

It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

But, you can't just go on being a brick stonewall forever.' 'I don't see why not,' she said. 'Nor do I see how not.

People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?

America could have used in other ways the energy that both groups have expended in this conflict. America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color.

What a long way, I thought, I've come — to be destroyed!

America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of color. But it has not dated to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. People more advantageously placed than we in Harlem were, and are, will no doubt find the psychology and the view of human nature sketched above dismal and shocking in the extreme.

What a long way, I thought, I've come—to be destroyed!