Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books-- where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables as we did in Kansas. ― Langston Hughes

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I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom. - Simone de Beauvoir

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Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected. ― George Washington

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Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems. - Jonathan Gottschall

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Lawrence has a wonderful hill in it, with a university on top and the first time I ran away from home, I ran up the hill and looked across the world: Kansas wheat fields and the Kaw River, and I wanted to go some place, too. I got a whipping for it. ― Langston Hughes

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I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

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Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. ― Langston Hughes

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We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow.- Eduardo Galeano

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O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?

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Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America? -Fannie Lou Hamer

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