“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.”
“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.”
John Howard Griffin
“If the judgement makes the law and not the law directs the judgement, it is impossible there should be such a thing as an illegal judgement given.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“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.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“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.”
John Howard Griffin“They don't 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 don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning.”
John Howard Griffin“I'm annoyed by those who love mankind but are discourteous to people.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“He was not talking with US, but with his IMAGE of us.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and detested.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.”
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me“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.”
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