A new world order is in the making, and it is up to us to prepare ourselves that we may take our rightful place in it.
A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.
Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.
He said, one time, that no true leader burdened his followers with a greater load than they could carry, and no true leader sets too fast a pace for his follows to keep up.
I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.
I think that an objective reader may see how in the society to which I was exposed as a black youth here in America, for me to wind up in a prison was really just about inevitable. It happens to so many thousands of black youth.
I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.
If you have a dog, I must have a dog. If you have a rifle, I must have a rifle. If you have a club, I must have a club. This is equality.
In fact, once he is motivated no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom. I call myself the best example of that.
In the United States, it is our weakness to confuse the numerical strength of an organization and the publicity attached to leaders with the germinating forces that sow the seeds of social upheaval in our community.
Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.
Tell him that he and all of the other moderate Negroes who are getting somewhere need to always remember that it was us extremists who made it possible.
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