The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

Every time I embrace a black woman I’m embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I’m hugging freedom. The white man forbade me to have the white woman on pain of death... I will not be free until the day I can have a white woman in my bed.

What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.

I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.

Everybody changes, not just me.

You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.

I've gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.