Stanley Crouch

“When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.”

“Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.”

“The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.”

“What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.”

“Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.”

“Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.”

“Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.”

“As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.”

“In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.”

“When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.”

“Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.”

“If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.”

“I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.”

“The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.”

“Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.”

“Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately.”

“All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.”

“I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.”

“Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.”

“You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.”