There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.

If a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood.

These Negroes who go for integration and intermarriage are linking up with the very people who lynched their fathers, raped their mothers, and put their kid sisters in the kitchen to scrub floors.

We don't think that we're begging for anything. We think we're demanding what is ours by right. And all we're asking for is an opportunity to do something for ourselves, rather than to sit around as a beggar, begging for jobs and begging for education from - for someone else for the rest of our lives.

Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.

I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn't know how to return the treatment.

Here you have 22 million Afro-Americans, black people today, catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I'm here to tell you, in case you don't know it, that you got a new - you got a new generation of black people in this country, who don't care anything whatsoever about odds. They don't want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds.