“The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.”
“The teen-age years have been at once the despair and fascination of novelists and playwrights. They are the gawkiest years of life, and the most precarious, with stirrings of beauty and desire and adventure, all of them this side of the articulate.”
“Pass a new Federal Civil Rights statute, as Carey McWilliams has been urging. I am convinced that the problem of drafting it is not too difficult. Recent Supreme Court decisions also point to its constitutionality. The real problems will be those of enforcement. But, however hard that may be, let us at least put it on the record that as a matter of national policy we outlaw lynching, Jim Crowism, and racial injustice in every form.”
“Create experimental mixed units of volunteers in the Army and Navy. No one need be forced into them. But there are plenty of Americans, white and black, who would want to give democracy a chance in the armed forces.”
“You will say, this is a long road. Injustice is longer. You will say, this is drastic. Bloodshed and hate are more drastic. You will say, it can't be done. But that is just what the enemies of American life are counting on you to say.”
“No American has a constitutional duty to like all or any of his fellow-Americans. Although I must add as a footnote that to dislike someone before you know him seems to me stupid.”