If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.
We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.
I just don’t believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.
We black men have a hard enough time in our own struggle for justice, and already have enough enemies as it is, to make the drastic mistake of attacking each other and adding more weight to an already unbearable load.
America preaches integration and practices segregation.
We’re all in the same boat and we all are going to catch the same hell from the same man.
Learn the language that they understand, and when they come upon our doorstep to talk we can talk, and they will get the point. There will be a dialog, there will be some communication, and I am quite certain that then there will be some understanding.
You can always chase a dream but it will not count if you never catch it.
Daring to reach, to climb, to crawl, to scratch, to get back up when you’ve been knocked down, to push forward – ever forward – to forgive. It means sacrificing everything if necessary, to carve out a place for your own existence. It means living.
If not now then when, if not me then who?
Reform is for people who have government connections, revolution is for the people!
America’s greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.
History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.
America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.
So over you is the greatest enemy a man can have and that is fear. I know some of you are afraid to listen to the truth-you have been raised on fear and lies. But I am going to preach to you the truth until you are free of that fear...
I, for one, will join in with anyone – I don’t care what color you are – as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.
Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.
Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it.
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.