However, it might go, I should have no regrets. If I should be reduced to begging in the street, then I should enjoy the feel of pavement beneath my feet and the odors of asphalt and automobile exhausts. Good and bad fortune were equally attractive when viewed in such a context. Hunger was as interesting as satiety. A life without sight was as interesting as life with sight. Who was to say different? Society? The bulk of humanity? They were living their first lives, cautiously aware that someday they would die. They had everything to lose. Furthermore, they could not take the risks. But I had been through death, had my insides burned out by it twice. I was living a second life, freed of those cautious awareness. I had nothing to lose. Furthermore, I could take all the risks.

— 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

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

— John Howard Griffin

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

I'm annoyed by those who love mankind but are discourteous to people.

— John Howard Griffin

In the context of today, this WAS heroism.

— John Howard Griffin

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

— John Howard Griffin

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.

— John Howard Griffin

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 man's face. I felt like saying: "What in God's name are you doing to yourself?

— John Howard Griffin

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.

— John Howard Griffin