Western interests: imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, racism, and other negative -isms.
Don’t you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who’s depriving you of your rights. They’re not your friends, no, they’re your enemies. Treat them like that.
I believe in Islam. I am a Muslim and there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, nothing wrong with the religion of Islam. It just teaches us to believe in Allah as the God.
Any time you know you’re within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in. But don’t die alone. Let your dying be reciprocal. This is what is meant by equality. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Any time Uncle Sam, with all his machinery for warfare, is held to a draw by some rice eaters, he’s lost the battle.
Be nonviolent only with those who are nonviolent to you. And when you can bring me a nonviolent racist, bring me a nonviolent segregationist, then I’ll get nonviolent. But don’t teach me to be nonviolent until you teach some of those crackers to be nonviolent.
Anytime you have to rely upon your enemy for a job you’re in bad shape.
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.