The short-range involves the long-range. Immediate steps have to be taken to reeducate our people into the, a more real view of political, economic, and social conditions in this country, and our ability in, in a self- improvement program to gain control politically over every community in which we predominate, and also over the economy of that same community as here in Harlem. Instead of all the stores in Harlem being owned by white people, they should be owned and operated by black people.

The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in America.

Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action.

The only thing power respects, is power.

The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.

I looked on the television the other night and saw them beating a Negro unmercifully in Mississippi. And this is the result of a brainwashing technique, a certain power structure in the American government has paid these Negro integrationist leaders to perpetuate among our people. But it's not a good thing, and it will never solve our problem.

At this point I hadn't yet gotten deep into the historic condition that negroes in this country are confronted with, but at that point in my prison studies I, I read, I studied Islam as a religion more so than as I later come to know it in its connection with the plight or problem of Negroes in this country.