I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against.

In order, in order to enforce you can't force people to act right toward each other. You can't force, you cannot legislate heart, conditions and attitudes.

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 believe that it would be almost impossible to find anywhere in America a black man who has lived further down in the mud of human society than I have; or a black man who has been any more ignorant than I have; or a black man who has suffered more anguish during his life than I have. But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.

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.

[Negro] should realize that he is living in a war zone, and he is at war with an enemy that is as vicious and criminal and inhuman as any war-making country has ever been.