“Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.”

“I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.”

“We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.”

“When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.”

“If you have a dog, I must have a dog. If you have a rifle, I must have a rifle. If you have a club, I must have a club. This is equality.”

“Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”

“I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else’s control. I feel that what I’m thinking and saying is now for myself. Before it was for and by the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. Now I think with my own mind, sir!”

“If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.”

“To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.”

“I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.”

“You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself.”

“My black brothers and sisters – of all religious beliefs, or of no religious beliefs – we all have in common the greatest binding tie we could have. We are all black people!”

“Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.”

“Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.”

“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.”

“It’s hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent.”

“In the past, the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer. If I take my hand and slap you, you don’t even feel it. It might sting you because these digits are separated. But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together.”

“When we see that our problem is so complicated and so all-encompassing in its intent and content, then we realize that it is no longer a Negro problem, confined only to the American Negro; that it is no longer an American problem, confined only to America, but it is a problem for humanity.”

“Change is only a good thing if you change in a good way.”

“I want to take Negroes out of the ghetto and put them in good neighborhoods in good houses.”

“If you turn the other cheek, you can be enslaved for 1,000 years.”

“Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.”

“You can’t legislate good will – that comes through education.”

“The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.”

“America is the first country that can actually have a bloodless revolution.”

“Do you know what integration really means? It means intermarriage. That’s the real point behind it. You can’t have it without intermarriage. And that would result in disintegration of both races.”

“Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.”

“Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.”

“Fame is the thirst of youth.”

“What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.”

“I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.”

“Who tracks the steps of glory to the grave?”

“He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below.”

“A drop of ink may make a million think.”

“I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.”

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.”

“If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company.”

“I can’t but say it is an awkward sight to see one’s native land receding through the growing waters; it unmans one quite, especially when life is rather new.”

“Always laugh when you can…it is a cheap medicine.” –

“Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.”

“Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.”

“The busy have no time for tears.”

“Prolonged endurance tames the bold.”

“Smiles form the channels of a future tear.”

“The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.” – Lord Byron

“We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.”

“Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.”

“If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.”

“Men are the sport of circumstances when it seems circumstances are the sport of men.”

“There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.”