John Howard Griffin

It is always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you'll get along.

When a man starts out to build a world, he starts first with himself.

There's a strange and powerful symbiosis between men and their vehicles.

Hate is just a failure of imagination.

It's easy to look back and see it, and it shows that the past was what it was. It wasn’t just the way things worked out.

I learned within a few hours that I could leave my body and exist as a brain alone.

I was learning, by degrees, that the Negro in America can't be blamed for his racial animosities -- they are, in fact, so deep-seated and so tenacious as to be practically an integral part of his personality; neither can he be realistically expected to abide by a white man's conceptions of law and order when he is the constant victim of innumerable injustices.

I realized that a man who had lived only thirty-six years could not have anything to leave behind him but the living and those who have been touched by his actions or words.

The only honest way for me to learn about others is to listen to them.

I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don't know each other, and they don't know each other because they don't communicate with each other, and they don't communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.

I am an individual; I am one man. I am not the South. I am not a race. I am not a class. I am not even particularly a member of any majority. I am an individual. And that is just the thing that no one, but no one, will forgive.

The Negro was a person who had no control over his life, who was afraid of death, who was powerless to defend his family and himself.