If the ballot doesn't work, we'll try something else. But let us try the ballot.

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.

Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.

When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.

I think teaching a man to hate himself is much more criminal than teaching a man to hate someone else.

Let's cool it brothers . . . Spoken to his assassins, three men who stabbed him 16 times.

Negroes just can't judge each other according to color, because we are all colors, all complexions.