When I was in prison, I read an article - don't be shocked when I say I was in prison. You're still in prison. That's what America means: prison.

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.

They tell us we are all citizens, that we were born in this country. Well, a cat can have kittens in the oven, but that doesn't make them biscuits!

Either you are a citizen or you are not a citizen at all. If you are citizen, you are free; if youre not a citizen you are a slave.

If I go home and someone, and my child has blood running down her leg and someone tells me that a snake bit her, I'm going out and kill the snake. And when I find the snake, I'm not going to look and see if he has blood on his jaws.

I'm trying to get at this. That is, a man may know that he belongs to, say, a group - this group or that group - but he feels himself lost within that group, trapped within his own deficiencies and without personal purpose.

One thing that the white man can never give the black man is self respect. The black man in the ghettos, have to start self correcting his own material moral, and spiritual defects, and evil. The black man need to start his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction and prostitution. The black man in America has to lift up his own sense of values.