You plant twenty coconut trees over here, and twenty coconut trees over there, and you water this batch and don't water that batch. Of the batch you water, nineteen will survive and one will die. Of the batch you don't water, nineteen will die and one will survive.

We all have to die, and I preferred to have just one death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without response is to die many deaths.

Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that's chewing up.

I think people involved with institutions find it harder to know the time to go than the time to come.

I never met a white person till I was a grown man. I never went to school with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar, and will be with me for the rest of my life.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison.

You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response.