As bad as I was, as much trouble and worry as I caused my mother, I loved her.

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.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

I was an atheist, I was open-minded, and I began to read in that direction, in the direction of Islam, and everything that I read about it appealed to me.

If I can't run my neighborhood you won't want me in your neighborhood.

Forget the methods or the differences in methods. As long as we agree that the thing that the Afro-American wants and needs is recognition and respect as a human being.

Only the whites in the South aren't hypocritical about it. You don't find any more inter - there is just as much social intermixing in the South as there - between the races as there is in the North. Only they - in the South they let you know - where they stand, and in the North they take a hypocritical approach or attitude or reaction.