You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.

[My father] did get enough money to buy mules. We didn't have tractors, but he bought mules, wagons, cultivators and some farming equipment. As soon as he bought that and decided to rent some land, because it was always better if you rent the land, but as soon as he got the mules and wagons and everything, somebody went to our trough - a white man who didn't live very far from us - and he fed the mules Paris Green, put it in their food and it killed the mules and our cows.

There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement. Three people are better than no people.

If this is a Great Society, I'd hate to see a bad one.

A white man killed the mules and our cows that knocked us right back down. And things got so tough then I began to wish I was white.

We worked all the time, just worked and then we would be hungry and my mother was clearing up a new ground trying to help feed us for $1.25 a day. She was using an axe, just like a man, and something flew up and hit her in her eye. It eventually caused her to lose both of her eyes and I began to get sicker and sicker of the system there. I used to see my mother wear clothes that would have so many patches on them, they had been done over and over and over again. She would do that but she would try to keep us decent.

You don't have to like everybody, but you have to love everybody.