After I made my tour in the Middle, into the Middle-East and Africa and visited Mecca and other places, I think that the separation [ from the Black Muslim movement] became psychological as well as physical, so that I could look at it more objectively and - and separate that which was good from that which was bad.

If not now then when, if not me then who?

More so than any other city on the African continent, the people of Cairo look like the American Negroes in the sense that we have all complexions, we range in America from the darkest black to the lightest light, and here in Cairo it is the same thing; throughout Egypt, it is the same thing. All of the complexions are blended together here in a truly harmonious society.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.

Any number of my former brothers felt they would make heroes of themselves in the Nation of Islam if they killed me. ...I knew that no one would kill you quicker than Muslim if he felt that's what Allah wanted him to do.

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.