John Howard Griffin Quotes

He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.

~ John Howard Griffin

The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who have a college education, he observes, need to take menial jobs and begin to look for excitement in less productive places.

~ 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

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

How can you render the duties of justice to men when you're afraid they'll be so unaware of justice they may destroy you? ...especially since their attitude toward their own race is a destructive one.

~ John Howard Griffin

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

~ 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

We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk , were suddenly elevated in status by this man's misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor.

~ John Howard Griffin

...[A] lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can-mostly in pleasure,and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid.

~ John Howard Griffin

Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty

~ John Howard Griffin

In the context of today, this WAS heroism.

~ John Howard Griffin

We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.

~ 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

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

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.

~ John Howard Griffin

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

He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.

~ John Howard Griffin

All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy.

~ John Howard Griffin

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. 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 awarenesses.I had nothing to lose. 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

We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him, how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rights that we did not also have.

~ John Howard Griffin

DESEGREGATE THE BUSES WITH THIS 7 POINT PROGRAM:1. Pray for guidance.2. Be courteous and friendly.3. Be neat and clean.4. Avoid loud talk.5. Do not argue.6. Report incidents immediately.7. Overcome evil with good.Sponsored by Interdenominational Ministerial AllianceRev. A. L. Davis, Pres.Rev. J. E. Poindexter, Secretary

~ John Howard Griffin

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

He was not talking with US, but with his IMAGE of us.

~ John Howard Griffin

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

~ John Howard Griffin

A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.

~ John Howard Griffin