TSHEMBE Perhaps my obsessions have made me myopic! In this light, for instance, I really cannot tell you from Major Rice! (Peering close into the oth… - Lorraine Hansberry

"Don't you understand man? The slogans of capitulation can KILL! Every time we say "Live and let live" — death triumphs! Too much has happened, too much has happened to me. . . . That which warped and distorted all of us is — all around: it is in this very air! This swirling, seething, madness that you ask us all to help maintain! It's no good, Wally — your world. It's no — damn — good! You have forced me to take a position. Finally — the one thing I never wanted to do. Just not being for you is not enough. To live, to breathe — I've got to be against you"

TSHEMBE (Closing his eyes, wearily) I said racism is a device that, of itself, explains nothing. It is simply a means. An invention to justify the rule of some men over others. CHARLIE (Pleased to have at last found common ground) But I agree with you entirely! Race hasn’t a thing to do with it actually. TSHEMBE Ah — but it has! CHARLIE (Throwing up his hands) Oh, come on, Matoseh. Stop playing games! Which is it, my friend? TSHEMBE I am not playing games. (He sighs and now, drawn out of himself at last, proceeds with the maximum precision and clarity he can muster) I am simply saying that a device is a device, but that it also has consequences: once invented it takes on a life, a reality of its own. So, in one century, men invoke the device of religion to cloak their conquests. In another, race. Now, in both cases you and I may recognize the fraudulence of the device, but the fact remains that a man who has a sword run through him because he refuses to become a Moslem or a Christian — or who is shot in Zatembe or Mississippi because he is black — is suffering the utter reality of the device. And it is pointless to pretend that it doesn’t exist — merely because it is a lie! CHARLIE

The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.