Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

— Richard Wright

Out of the magazines I read came a passionate call for the experiences of the disinherited, and there were none of the lame listings of the missionary in it. It did not say: "Be like us, and we will like you, maybe." It said: "If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.

— Richard Wright

Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million people. I beg you to recognize human life draped in a form and guise alien to ours, but springing from a soil plowed and sown by our own hands. I ask you to recognize laws and processes flowing from such a condition, understand them, seek to change them. If we do none of these, then we should not pretend horror or surprise when thwarted life expresses itself in fear and hate and crime.

— Richard Wright

The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances life by his prolonged concentration upon it, while the politician emphasizes the impersonal aspect of life by his attempts to fit men into groups.

— Richard Wright

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.

— Richard Wright

The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again, and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.

— Richard Wright

Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.

— Richard Wright

...the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is building it's time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.

— Richard Wright

There are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

— Richard Wright

The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.

— Richard Wright