"I would like people to feel that they've understood something more about Siena than the usual Palio as seen by tourists. It is full of beauty, romance and tradition, but also power, schemes and bribery. It's Italy in a nutshell, with all its incredible mixture of beauty and betrayal."

“Many people asked me to convert. I said my religious convictions remain. I am fighting the wrongs within my own community. And if I decide to convert I will lose the right to fight.”

Source : Source: www.counterpunch.org

“It’s this perspective of us as humans to look at our world through the lens of ‘normal’ [that] is one of the forces that stops us developing real solutions.”

“Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.”

“I always thought I was going to be on the other side of the camera. That's where I found myself. I found out that I could write when I was 17, right before you go to college, so it was a passion of mine.”

“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

Source : World Tomorrow "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928)

“When it comes to my rights as an American citizen, and yours, I am a triumphalist and an absolutist. Anything less is an insult,”

Source : James Meredith (2012). “A Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

“Skibbereen have a hard time at [math]; the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.”

“Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.”