John Howard Griffin said this quote

“ 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. ”

Famous Quotes of John Howard Griffin

Famous quotes of John Howard Griffin from the classy quote

See all

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