There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.
Any time you demonstrate against segregation and a man has the audacity to put a police dog on you, kill that dog, kill him, I’m telling you, kill that dog. I say it if they put me in jail tomorrow, kill that dog. Then you’ll put a stop to it.
You spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don’t even know there’s a human-rights tree on the same floor.
We who follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad feel that when you try and pass integration laws here in America, forcing white people to pretend that they are accepting black people, what you are doing is making white people act in a hypocritical way.
My sincerity is my credentials.
It’s got to be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you’re afraid to use an expression like that, you should get back in the cotton patch, you should get back in the alley.
I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.
Much of what I say might sound like it’s stirring up trouble, but it’s the truth!
If the government can’t get the black man justice, then it’s time for the black man to get some justice for himself.
The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has, the rest of us have always been living in a lie.
You don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.
If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.
As I say, if we bring up religion we’ll have differences; we’ll have arguments; and we’ll never be able to get together.
Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.
If you are Black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. As long as you are South of the Canadian border, you are South.
If you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you’ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies.
Only the mistakes were mine.
When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.
I don’t have any hate. I’ve got some sense. I’m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to love him. I’m not that way-out.
Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and thereby increase self-respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.