Quote collection
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"Whoever is standing up telling the white man that his position is unjust and that the black people should not have to wait for any Supreme Court, Congress or Senate to legislate, or even the president to issue any kind of - of a proclamation to better the condition of our people, if a N - if he - if a, if a Negro leader is standing up, making that point clear, then he's all right with us."
"As long as Negro leader is making the white man think that our people are satisfied to sit in his house and wait for him to correct these conditions, he is - he is misrepresenting the thinking of the black masses, and he's doing the white man a disservice because he's making the white man be more complacent than he would be if he knew the dangerous situation that is building up right inside his own house."
"That morning was when I first began to reappraise the 'white man.' It was when I first began to perceive that 'white man,' as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions."
"Uncle Sam is forcing integration only because he's trying to impress the people of - abroad that he's morally qualified to be the leader of the world."
"My family was so poor we were close to eating the holes inside of doughnuts."
"In America you have the mouse now trying to sit down on the elephant, thinking that he's going somewhere. And it's - and it's absurd."
"If Christianity had asserted itself in Germany, six million Jews would have lived."
"As bad as I was, as much trouble and worry as I caused my mother, I loved her."
"One of my brothers read a lot. His head was forever in some book."
"God is about to eliminate the white man from this earth."
"God is more lasting than the white man."
"You don't do anything to further your stay aboard a ship that you see is going to go down to the bottom of the ocean."
"Moses tried to separate his people from Pharaoh, and when he tried, the magicians tried to fool the people into staying with the Pharaoh, and we look upon these other organizations that are trying to get Negroes to integrate with this doomed white man as nothing but modern-day magicians, and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is a modern-day Moses trying to separate us from the modern-day Pharaoh."
"We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as free humans in this society."
"Whereas the only real solution to the race problem in this country is a solution that involves individual self improvement and collective self improvement in, whereas our own, wherein our own people are concerned."
"America is a white man's country."
"Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals."
"Internal differences within the Nation of Islam forced me out of it. I did not leave of my own free will. But now that it has happened, I intend to make the most of it. Now that I have more independence of action, I intend to use a more flexible approach toward working with others to get a solution to this problem."
"Let's cool it brothers . . . Spoken to his assassins, three men who stabbed him 16 times."
"There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn't get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call 'em "chitt'lin'" nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That's what you were -- a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters."