John Howard Griffin

All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy.

He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.

A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the mortal duty to will only that which is good.

Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this "separation" may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they truly speak as equals and in which the white man will no longer load every phrase with unconscious suggestions that he has something to "concede" to black men or that he wants to help black men "overcome" their blackness.

To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.

I learned a strange thing... that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word "nigger" leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and it always stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance. I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged.

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...

We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.

Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty

In the context of today, this WAS heroism.