Any time you put too many sparks around a powder keg, the thing is going to explode, and if the things that explodes is still inside the house, then the house will be destroyed.

The black people in this country are taught that their religion and the best religion is the religion of Islam, and when one accepts the religion of Islam, he's known as a Muslim.

I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else's control. I feel that what I'm thinking and saying is now for myself. Before it was for and by the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. Now I think with my own mind, sir!

The white press itself created civil right leaders.

I grew up in the country on a farm it was whenever someone said even that a snake was eating the chickens or bothering the chickens, we'd kill snakes. We never knew whether that was the snake that did it.

In Harlem, for instance, all of the stores are owned by white people, all of the buildings are owned by white people. The black people are just there - paying rent, buying the groceries; but they don't own the stores, clothing stores, food stores, any kind of stores; don't even own the homes that they live in. They are all owned by outsiders, and for these run-down apartment dwellings, the black man in Harlem pays more money than the man down in the rich Park Avenue section.

You'd have civil war. You'd have a race war in this country.