You don’t have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
I have lived those lines and I know that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats.
I’ve gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.
In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die.
The paper tiger hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet.
All the gods are dead except the god of war.
The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.
If God himself wills such misery on people whom I love, then I say I will deal with him.
What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.
The struggle of our people for freedom has progressed to the form where all of us must take a stand either for or against the freedom of our people You are either with Your People or against them. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
But it is not that easy, is it? I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain.
If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.
Pig power in America was infuriating, but pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable.
With all its faults, the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.
Everybody changes, not just me.
The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde.
There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness.
The object is for everyone to do their own thing, but the thing is to make one’s thing the Revolution.
I did not know that I had all these feelings inside me. They have never been aroused before. Now they cascade down upon my head and threaten to beat me down to the ground, into the dust.
We knew that in the end what they were clashing over was us, what to do with the blacks, and whether or not to start treating us as human beings.