It's got to be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you're afraid to use an expression like that, you should get back in the cotton patch, you should get back in the alley.

The American system itself is incapable. It is as incapable of producing freedom for the Afro-American as the system of a chicken is of producing a duck egg.

What the white man in America needs to realize is there's a new thinking among black people today which makes them not willing to sit around and wait for five years to get this problem solved, much less a hundred years.

When I said [ I would work with any organization] I would make the, the reservation that I would work with any organization as long as it didn't make us compromise our religious principles.

Learn to see, listen, and think for yourself.

It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.

You and I have never seen democracy; all we've seen is hypocrisy.