The other slaves in the field never let that house slave knew - know what they were really thinking. If the house slave said, well one of these days all of us will live in the plantation, they said, uh huh. They went along with him. But if you came up to them and said, let's go, they would be gone just like that.And in, in America you have the same situation.You have the vast masses who are still slaves.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

I am not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I am one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, and one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism... You and I have never seen democracy; all we've seen is hypocracy... If you go to jail, so what? If you're black, you were born in jail. If you're black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the Canadian border, you're south.

Nowhere in history has the white man been brotherly toward anyone.

People involved in a revolution don't become part of the system; they destroy the system... The Negro revolution is no revolution because it condemns the system and then asks the system it has condemned to accept them.

It is not a case of our people...wanting either separation or integration. The use of these words actually clouds the real picture. The 22 million Afro-Americans don't seek either separation or integration. They seek recognition and respect as human beings.