"Man, born of woman, has found it a hard thing to forgive her for giving him birth. The patriarchal protest against the ancient matriarch has borne strange fruit through the years."
"To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely."
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Source: Acceptance speech for the Charles S. Johnson Award at Fisk University, 1966.
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"Faith and doubt both are needed - not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve."
"When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die."
"Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation."
"The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making."
"The point of life is to find the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality."