“A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.”

Lincoln was the spokesman of the rising capitalist class of the North, who viewed the emancipation of Negro slaves as indispensable to the development and triumph of the manufacturers and bankers of the industrial North, East and West over the slave-holder of the South.

I personally pledge myself to openly counsel, aid, and abet youth, both black and white, to quarantine any Jim Crow conscription system.

The Negro was a political football between his former slave master and Northern political adventurers.

If someone tried to deprive you of your rights, you’ve got to resist it. You’ve got to resent it. You’ve got to fight against it.

Since almost all Negroes are workers, live on wages, and suffer from the high cost of food, clothing and shelter, it is obvious that the Republican and Democratic Parties are opposed to their interests.

Freedom is never given; it is won.

I am prepared to oppose a Jim Crow army till I rot in jail.

I don’t ever remember a single day of hopelessness. I knew from the history of the labor movement, especially of the black people, that it was an undertaking of great trial. That, live or die, I had to stick with it, and we had to win.

I suggest that ten thousand Negroes march on Washington, D.C., the capital of the Nation, with the slogan, ‘We loyal Negro American citizens demand the right to work and fight for our country.’

Men cannot win freedom unless they win equality. They cannot win equality unless they win freedom.

Loyalty is meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to.

Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.

Negroes are in no mood to shoulder guns for democracy abroad while they are denied democracy here at home.

Freedom is never granted; it is won.

Lincoln merely nominally freed the bodies of Negroes. But Debs would free the bodies and minds of Negroes.

Salvation for a race, nation or class must come from within.

Statism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.

There should be a graphic novel dealing with the contribution of the women of the civil rights movement, to tell their story.

Even in the civil rights movement, there were so many unbelievable women. They never, ever received the credit that they should have received. They did all of the, and I cannot say it, they did all of the dirty work. Hard work.

We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church.

The history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.

Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.