Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.

We don't think that we're begging for anything. We think we're demanding what is ours by right.

Until the image of the black man in the mind of the black man has been changed, there will always be delinquency, parental and juvenile. The idea is not to change the attitude of the white man to the black man but to change the attitude of the black man to himself.

I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.

The price of freedom is death.

Any group, any group that can't work with all other groups, if they are genuinely interested in solving the problems of the Negro collectively why, I don't think that that group is really sincerely motivated toward reaching a solution.

I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.