The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

Any negro who occupies a position that was given to him by the white man, if you analyze his function, his function never enables him to really take a firm, uncompromising, militant stand on problems that confront our people.

If you have no critics you'll likely have no success.

That value system has been handed right down in European society. And today when you find Negroes, if they even look like they're adopting these so-called middle-class values, standards, it's not that they are taking something from the white man, but they are probably identifying again with the level or standard that these same whites have gotten from them back during that period.

The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.

When a man understands who he is, who God is, who the devil is... then he can pick himself up out of the gutter; he can clean himself up and stand up like a man should before his God.

If you are in a country that is progressive, the woman is progressive. If you're in a country that reflects the consciousness toward the importance of education, it's because the woman is aware of the importance of education. But in every backward country you'll find the women are backward, and in every country where education is not stressed its because the women don't have education.