“The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West.

The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.

The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American.

I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.

A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.

Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense.

Virtue knows no color line.

In fact, for all kinds of offenses – and, for no offenses – from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the same.

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.

Those who commit the murders write the reports.

The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.

Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.

Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.

Every single thing is like a new thing, so it’s never what I expect.

Every song, every form of art, clothing, shoes, it has to be special.

I believe every translation is a process in which something is lost in the original precisely so that something is gained in the new text.

The age of credulity is every age the world has ever known. Men have always turned from the ascertained, which is limited and discouraging, to the dubious, which is unlimited and full of hope for everybody.

The happiness of every living thing is what we want.

We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble – all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure!

Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession.

The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought.