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.

Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?

Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

Many of them who belong to these countries that were former colonial powers have racist attitudes, but their racist attitude is never displayed to the degree that the America's attitude of racism is displayed. Never.

We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.

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.