I got a little tape recorder and laid it on my chest and kept describing the scene as I saw it. Just the opening scenes took about 45 minutes. I don’… - Alex Haley

Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars — caged. I am not saying there shouldn't be prisons, but there shouldn't be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He will never get completely over the memory of the bars.

Through this flesh, which is us, we are you, and you are us!

"The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion — but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led."