Those who stay here can help those who go back, and those who go back can help those who stay here in the same way that when Jews go to Israel, the Jews in America help those in Israel and the Jews in Israel help those in America.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.

I don't trust any white man who teaches Negroes to turn the other cheek or to be nonviolent, which means to be defenseless in the face of a very brutal, criminal enemy. No. That's my yardstick for measuring whites.

Nonviolence is his, is his method. Well, my objective is the same as [Martin Luther] King's.

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.

A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

If you read the story of slavery and see the part that the Uncle Tom played in the plantation, and then you see how the white man today has changed his tactics, but he still occupies the same position, in that same context you find Uncle Tom. He has changed his tactics but he still occupies the same position.