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

Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

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.

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

In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it's a sport.

Once we used to have to crank up our cars, now you can pop it on from inside your house. Everything has changed except how we get freedom.

Every holiday on the calendar, I check in a hotel and fast - I don't eat, I don't drink, I don't talk.