Quotes by John Howard Griffin

He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.

The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who have a college education, he observes, need to take menial jobs and begin to look for excitement in less productive places.

The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it.

Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the mans face. I felt like saying: What in Gods name are you doing to yourself?

How can you render the duties of justice to men when youre afraid theyll be so unaware of justice they may destroy you? ...especially since their attitude toward their own race is a destructive one.

If virtue does not equal powers, powers will be misused.

It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me.

It was the ghetto. I had seen them before from the high altitude of one who could look down and pity. Now I belonged here and the view was different. A first glance told it all. Here it was pennies and clutter and spittle on the curb... Here was the indefinable stink of despair. Here modesty was the luxury. People struggled for it... Here sensuality was escape, proof of manhood for people who could prove it no other way... Here hips drew the eye and flirted with the eye and caused the eye to lust or laugh. It was better to look at hips than at the ghetto.

We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk , were suddenly elevated in status by this mans misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor.

...[A] lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can-mostly in pleasure,and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid.

They dont deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white..., they only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and leisure time, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics dont spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a mans conditioning.

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.

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

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, well never have the right answers...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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