Mankind's history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual. Men are attracted by spirit. By power, men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power anxieties are created.

America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don't have some humor, you'll crack up.

Western interests: imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, racism, and other negative -isms.

They asked if I knew what 'conscientious objector' meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.

Of all our studies, it is history that is best qualified to reward our research.

And what makes the whites who have these middle-class values have those values? Where did they get it? They didn't have these same values four hundred years, five hundred years ago.

Nonviolence is his, is his method. Well, my objective is the same as [Martin Luther] King's.