You're always being judged. No matter what you do, it's not the right thing. If you didn't become successful, then you'd be pointed at as one of those creatures down their who didn't take advantage of this or that, who didn't climb and rise and so forth.

Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.

I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.

I know that statistically, it has been proven that there is a tremendous amount of black on black crime within the inner cities.

The anti-blackness has generated new forms of youth involvement in anti-whiteness, which in some cases is appalling.

I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.

There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European.