I think that Abraham Lincoln probably did more to trick negroes than any other man in history.

The prison systems in this country actually are exploitative and they are not in any way rehabilitative.

Can you accuse me, if a man is putting a rope around my neck, of being violent, when I violently struggle against this lyncher to try and keep him from putting a rope around my innocent neck? Why, you'd be insane to cause me - to call me violent.

Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.

Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.

The American system itself is incapable. It is as incapable of producing freedom for the Afro-American as the system of a chicken is of producing a duck egg.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.