I go for Mao Tse-tung much more than, than Nehru because I think that Nehru brought his country up in a beggar's role.

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

You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress ... No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I am concerned, as long as it is not shown to everyone of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me.

It has been nine years since the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools, yet less than ten per cent of the Negro students in the South are in integrated schools. That isn't integration, that's tokenism!

To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal. You see, I could conceive death, but I could not conceive betrayal.

Of all our studies, it is history that is best qualified to reward our research.

We may disagree on methods [with Martin Luther King], but we don't have to argue all day on methods.