“You don’t have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.”

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

I’ve gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.

I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die.

What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.

The object is for everyone to do their own thing, but the thing is to make one’s thing the Revolution.

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.

We knew that in the end what they were clashing over was us, what to do with the blacks, and whether or not to start treating us as human beings.

We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.

The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde.

I’ve gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.

You don’t have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.

Sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings.

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.

If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.

They use force, to make you do, what the deciders, have decided you must do.

It is the honey which makes us cruel enough to ignore the death of a bee.

Now we suffer the evils of a long peace; luxury more cruel than war broods over us and avenges a conquered world.

Self love is a strength that only a few possess in this cruel world, don’t ever think of it as a weakness.

If you keep quiet and claim that your silence speaks, you’re silently part of the cruelty that goes around you. Thus make your voice sing.

Holy shadows of the dead, I am not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate, but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people to fight one another.

Imagination is lost in reality’s cruelty.

I know I could be a petty queen, I could release all the receipts the way you treated me. But honey I’m happier living in peace than cruelty.

This cruel world fails to embrace the beauty of tender souls and then wonders why everyone turns cold?