If the Emancipation Proclamation was authentic, you wouldn't have a race problem.

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites.

This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely.

I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.

The government has departments to deal with the special interest groups that make themselves heard and felt. A Department of Agriculture cares for the farmers' needs. There is a Department of Health, Education and Welfare. There is a Department of the Interior - in which the Indians are included. Is the farmer, the doctor, the Indian, the greatest problem in America today? No - it is the black man! There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems.

I am not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I am one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, and one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism... You and I have never seen democracy; all we've seen is hypocracy... If you go to jail, so what? If you're black, you were born in jail. If you're black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the Canadian border, you're south.