Quote collection
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"I shall never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes who through my own evangelistic zeal now believe in him even more fanatically and more blindly than I did."
"If the government can't get the black man justice, then it's time for the black man to get some justice for himself."
"Much of what I say might sound like it's stirring up trouble, but it's the truth!"
"In my recent travels into African countries and others, I was impressed by the importance of having a working unity among all peoples, black as well as white."
"There seems in most countries to be either one extreme or the other. Truly a paradise could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values could be properly balanced."
"[Black nationalism] is not designed to make the black man reevaluate the white man--you know him already--but to make the black man re-evaluate himself. Don't change the white man's mind; you can't change his mind. And that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America--America's conscience is bankrupt."
"We cannot think of uniting with others, until after we have first united among ourselves... One can't unite bananas with scattered leaves."
"I'm with an old family" was the euphemism used to dignify the professions of white folks' cooks and maids who talked so affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury [Massachusetts] that you couldn't even understand them."
"First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I'm inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word "revolution" loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind."
"After you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you."
"We believe in one God. We believe Muhammad is the Apostle of God."
"The black people of America have been victims of violence at the hands of the white men for four hundred years, and following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us."
"My faith in God is such that I am not afraid."
"The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in America."
"The only way the two can have equal job opportunities is if black people have factories as, as well as white people have factories."
"... the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist."
"Betty's a good Muslim woman and wife. I don't imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening this brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job"
"America is subsidizing what is left of the prestige and strength of the once mighty Britain. The sun has set forever on that monocled, pith-helmeted resident colonialist, sipping tea with his delicate lady in the non-white colonies being systematically robbed of every valuable resource. Britain's superfluous royalty and nobility now exist by charging tourists to inspect the once baronial castles, and by selling memoirs, perfumes, autographs, titles, and even themselves."
"I don't know - too much about Robert Williams tactics, but if he was trying to defend himself, he was within his God-given rights and within - and he was also within his natural right, because first law of nature is self-preservation."
"Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural."