Don't be bitter. Remember Lot's wife when they kill me, and they surely will. You have to use all of your energy to do what it is you have to do. [To his wife Betty Shabazz]

That value system has been handed right down in European society. And today when you find Negroes, if they even look like they're adopting these so-called middle-class values, standards, it's not that they are taking something from the white man, but they are probably identifying again with the level or standard that these same whites have gotten from them back during that period.

It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

For 12 long years I lived within the narrow-minded confines of the 'straightjacket world' created by my strong belief that Elijah Muhammad was a messenger direct from God Himself, and my faith in what I now see to be a pseudo-religious philosophy that he preaches.... I shall never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes who through my own evangelistic zeal now believe in him even more fanatically and more blindly than I did.

Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.

I don't think you can having an opportunity to ride either on the front or the back or in the middle of someone else's bus doesn't dignify you.

My family was so poor we were close to eating the holes inside of doughnuts.