Dick Gregory Quotes

The only thing I like about St. Louis is it has the best zoo in America, in Forest Park. Washington University is next door to the zoo. Animals get out, they're going to eat white people before they get to the ghetto!

Don't have a high school diploma? You're in my Cabinet. Why? For 200 years, a lot of Cabinets have existed in our government. Powerful men. Well-educated. So let's try something totally new.

I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.

The free man is the man with no fears.

Whenever the dollar is held supreme and capitalistic interests dominate, a higher value will always be placed upon property rights than upon human rights.

When I lost my rifle, the Army charged me 85 dollars. That is why in the Navy the Captain goes down with the ship.

I buy about $1,500 worth of papers every month. Not that I trust them. I'm looking for the crack in the fabric.

If I had to write down the most important people in the history of this planet, No.1 would be (abolitionist) John Brown. Why? Because he's a white man who said he would die for the cause, because they could take him, but they weren't going to take his grandchildren. That brother was beautiful.

My belief is, you know, certain things have to be explained that's never been explained.

Luck is opportunity meeting up with preparation. So you must prepare yourself to be lucky.

Eating liver out of a cow's body is like eating the filter out of a car.

If democracy is such a good thing, let's have more of it.

Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It's the only way we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot.

You got to die of something because if you die of nothing, they won't pay your insurance.

If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one.

My wife and I went to jail in Selma. The difference when I was back there recently? White folks? No. Black folks who were not scared. I was behind the president this time. When I was a little boy and ran around with trifling dudes, I was the only one scared of dogs. And I was bitten 14 times! Dogs smell scared. And that's the same thing with people: 50 years ago they smelled fear. There was no fear this time.

In the South they don't mind how close I get, so long as I don't get too big. In the North they don't mind how big I get, so long as I don't get too close.

I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that.

Laughter is the best way to release tensions and fears.

America is 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 96 percent of the world's hard drugs.

I went to Ethiopia, and it dawned on me that you can tell a starving, malnourished person because they've got a bloated belly and a bald head. And I realized that if you come through any American airport and see businessmen running through with bloated bellies and bald heads, that's malnutrition, too.

Life isn't a race. It's a relay.

What price would God demand from the churches for having the audacity to lighten the color of his son's skin, and straighten out his nappy hair?

I used to get letters saying, 'I didn't know black children and white children were the same.'

If they took all the drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine off the market for six days, they'd have to bring out the tanks to control you.

Coconut milk is the only thing on this planet that comes identically to mother's milk.

In America, with all of its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun. But we don't know yet whether that sun is rising or setting for our country.

Martin Luther King taught us all nonviolence. I was told to extend nonviolence to the mother and her calf.

You hear entertainers all the time, saying, 'If I couldn't get paid for this, I'd do it for free.' When's the last time you ever heard a business person say, 'If I couldn't get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum, I'd do it for free'?

The jelly-bean eating thug says that national defense is important. But national defense starts at home.

A Klaner KKK is a cat who gets out of bed in the middle of the night and takes his sheet with him.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' "I said: 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.

The most difficult thing to get people to do is to accept the obvious.

There is a limit on how much information you can keep bottled up.

I consider myself always a humorist. And I think anybody who tells jokes or makes people laugh is humor.

Now here's what I'm saying: I've always believed that every other month we hear about compromisation of bank records, I think that's the CIA and the FBI. Now let me tell you why I'm saying this. I don't believe no insignificant pip-squeak is going to be able to pull this off month after month and we can't find out what's going on.

You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem? We're the only ones who know what it means to be Brand X.

We thought I was going to be a great athlete, and we were wrong, and I thought I was going to be a great entertainer, and that wasn't it either. I'm going to be an American Citizen. First class.

I don't know why America always thinks she has to run all around the world forcing people to take our way of governance at the barrel of a gun. When you've got something really good, you don't have to force it on people. They will steal it!

At the very last moment, Nature would force you to blink your eye. Nature will protect her own.

I didn't realize, when I decided to be a comic, that a black person had never been allowed to stand flat-footed in America and talk to white folks. It never happened before.

You know, I always say white is not a colour, white is an attitude, and if you haven't got trillions of dollars in the bank that you don't need, you can't be white.

Black folks tell their kids they have to be twice as good as a white person? Well, if I tell a child of mine that, or that they have to be careful - that this is what a cop would do if you do this - they think something is wrong with them. I tell them death is better.

The only person on the planet saying derogatory things about his woman is the black man.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

I was born and raised in St. Louis, and this little town, eight blocks away, place no one ever heard of, a black man there commands the attention of the world for months? That ain't my world.

When I was a boy, I was taught never to use insulting expressions like, 'I've been gypped,' or, 'He welshed on the deal.'

Fear and God do not occupy the same space.