"All of us - who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries - were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system."

"You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom."

"True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete."

"Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did."

"America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color."

"Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem."

"History is a people's memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals."

"The young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist."

"Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else."

"I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence."

"And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy - all we've seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare."

"You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it."

"Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, fromBirth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient."

"Never ask a woman about other men.Either she'll tell you a lie, and you still won't know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place."

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."

"I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action."

"I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence."

"It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep."

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."

"Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks."

"I am a Muslim, because it's a religion that teaches you an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It teaches you to respect everybody, and treat everybody right. But it also teaches you if someone steps on your toe, chop off their foot. And I carry my religious axe with me all the time."

"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 say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgment without evidence."

"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression."

"Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today."

"Even Samson, the world's strongest man, was destroyed by the woman who slept in his arms. she was the one whose words hurt him."

"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."

"If you have no critics you'll likely have no success."

"You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being."

"In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure."

"But let's not forget the Jew. Anybody that gives even a just criticism of the Jew is instantly labeled anti-Semite. The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him. You can tell the truth about any minority in America, but make a true observation about the Jew, and if it doesn't 't pat him on the back, then he uses his grip on the news media to label you anti-Semite."

"The Negro revolution is controlled by foxy white liberals, by the Government itself. But the Black Revolution is controlled only by God."

"Truth is on the side of the oppressed."

"A man who tosses worms in the river isn't 't necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm's got no hook in it, usually end up in the frying pan."

"You can't legislate good will - that comes through education."

"No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They're robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it's the truth. They are a black body with a white brain."

"All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life - that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business - you know they're doing something that you aren't."

"Power doesn't back up in the face of a smile, or in the face of a threat of some kind of nonviolent loving action. It's not the nature of power to back up in the face of anything but some more power."

"The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba -- yes Cuba too."

"To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace."

"The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years."

"It has hindered where it might have helped; it has been evasive when it was morally bound to be forthright; it has separated believers on the basis of color, although it has declared its mission to be a universal brotherhood under Jesus Christ. Christian love is the white man's love for himself and for his race."

"America's racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work."

"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."

"The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive."

"I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil."

"Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today."

"It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time.He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck."

"You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it."

"We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves."