I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner.

I believe that it would be almost impossible to find anywhere in America a black man who has lived further down in the mud of human society than I have; or a black man who has been any more ignorant than I have; or a black man who has suffered more anguish during his life than I have. But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

...the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world's collective non-white man.

Revolution is always based on land. Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated cup of coffee.

Once he [Negro] realizes that [he is at war ], then he can defend himself.

As long as Negro leader is making the white man think that our people are satisfied to sit in his house and wait for him to correct these conditions, he is - he is misrepresenting the thinking of the black masses, and he's doing the white man a disservice because he's making the white man be more complacent than he would be if he knew the dangerous situation that is building up right inside his own house.

When you go to a church and you see the pastor of that church with a philosophy and a program that's designed to bring black people together and elevate black people, join that church. Join that church. If you see where the NAACP is preaching and practicing that which is designed to make black nationalism materialize, join the NAACP. Join any kind of organization, civic, religious, fraternal, political, or otherwise that's based on lifting the black man up and making him master of his own community.