“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.”

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.

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.

Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight with us; principle has.

Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you’re deprived of it.

In sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.

But such a tiny and trivial thing as an umbrella can deprive you of the sight of such a stupendous fact as the sun.

I definitely gravitate towards things like vegetables, chicken, brown rice, but I don’t deprive myself of anything. If I want a Sprinkles cupcake, I’m having a Sprinkles cupcake. But I’m not going to have one every day… you just have to have a sensible outlook on all of it.

Adversity deprives us of our judgment.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

Without you I am like a plant deprived of sunshine wishing it could grow.