“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”

Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.

Revolutions are never peaceful.

Respect me, or put me to death.

Reading has changed the course of my life radically. I did not aim behind it to gain any certificates to improve my position. Rather, I wanted to live intellectually.

You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get it. Then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it.

Some things are better done than said.

Education is the means to help our children and thereby increase self-respect.

Education is the means to help our children and thereby increase self-respect.

Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.

Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.

All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

Those who would hunt a man need to remember that a jungle also contains those who hunt the hunters.

To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal. I could conceive death, but I could not conceive betrayal.

Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.

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.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,–cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men and women are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.

What I profess to do is help the oppressed and if I cause a load of discomfort in the white community and the black community, that in my opinion means I’m being effective, because I’m not trying to make them comfortable.

In cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing our greed and attachment. This allows our true nature to come out and become lighter and freer.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

I don’t know why people like being oppressed.