I calculate that I took 20,000 punches, but I earned millions and kept a lot of it. I may talk slow, but my mind is OK.

Whatever the challenge was, however unattainable the goal may have seemed, I never let anyone talk me out of believing in myself.

I think we're all brothers - that's the truth. But the press gave us the name black Muslims to cut us off from the others.

If the boxers are a little more colorful, talk a little like I did and just do half as much as I did for boxing, it will be all right.

So now I'm going to forget the 400 years of lynching and killing raping and depriving my people feeding of justice and equality and the lowest of low last respect and I'm going to look at two or three white people who are trying to do right and don't see the other million who are trying to kill me? I'm not that big of a fool.

I was always curious. And I always wondered why I had to die to go to Heaven.

I say get an education. Become an electrician, a mechanic, a doctor, a lawyer, anything but a fighter. In this trade, it's the managers that make the money and last the longest.