Turner knew his mother loved him. She just loved liquor more.

Here he was, slapping him five, grabbing his shoulder, and talking too loud in a performance of gregariousness. A walking flinch.

was impossible, like loving the one who wanted to destroy you, but that was the message of the movement: to trust in the ultimate decency that lived in every human heart.

But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.

You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.

Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.

How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one’s attention.

We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.

not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.