The Fire Next Time Quotes

“You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”

“The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them.”

“That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.”

“Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.”

“Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”

“God ... is white. ”

“The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality. ”

“And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children’s children.”

“And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

“And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then?”

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

“If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

“White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.”

“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

“We cannot be free until they are free.”

“This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose. You do not need ten such men—one will do. And Elijah, I should imagine, has had nothing to lose since the day he saw his father’s blood rush out—rush down, and splash, so the legend has it, down through the leaves of a tree, on him.”

“Furthermore, I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear.”

“Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other [country]. ”

“But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected.”

“Black has become a beautiful color—not because it is loved ... because it is feared.”

“One can give freedom only by setting someone free. ”

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? ”