"It's not a common thing for a Southern white family to go out and seek their black cousins."

"There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families, it would quickly become a meaningless act."

"Before the American Revolution there were frequent slave uprisings, and a lot of people would run away."

"If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one."

"He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm."

"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant."

"Britain is characterized not just by its independence but, above all, by its openness."

"Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back."