I think that the negro should reserve the right to execute.

America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don't have some humor, you'll crack up.

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.

When you have to pass a law to make a man let me have a house, or you have to pass a law to make a man let me go to school, or you have to pass a law to make a man let me walk down the street, you have to enforce that law and you'd have to be living actually in a police state. It would take a police state in this country.

The separating of a section of America for Afro- Americans is similar to expecting a heaven in the sky somewhere after you die.

If the so-called 'Christianity' now being practiced in America displays the best that world Christianity has left to offer - no one in his right mind should need any much greater proof that very close at hand is the end of Christianity.

The problem [ of the twenty-two million Afro-Americans] is so broad that it's going to take the inner working of all organizations.