“I never thought I’d see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we were in Mississippi.”

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said: ‘that’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.

Just being a Negro doesn’t qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

Did you know that in New Orleans they still have brown bag parties? What’s that, you ask? You and I go to a party, and when we get to the door, there’s a brown bag hanging down from the ceiling, and if our skin is darker than the brown bag, we can’t go in.

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

There’s a God force inside of you that gives you a will to live.

If it wasn’t for Abe Lincoln, I’d still be on the open market.

It’s cool to be healthy.

People with high blood pressure, diabetes – those are conditions brought about by lifestyle. If you change the lifestyle, those conditions will leave.

You know, I always say white is not a color, white is an attitude, and if you haven’t got trillions of dollars in the bank that you don’t need, you can’t be white.

I’m not a comic. I’m a humorist.

When I go through the airport and see white women walking through the airport barefooted, like athlete’s feet don’t exist, there’s something wrong.

Home was a place to be only when all other places were closed.

There is a limit on how much information you can keep bottled up.

I believe young voters will either vote for Obama or not vote at all. So the problem is not Obama the problem is the system. If you think about how mess up this country is, most folk really don’t have choices.

I tell people, ‘If you want to send a message to the White House, call my house.’

Love is very dangerous if you just have love and don’t have the ability to be lovable.

I don’t like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

In the gates of eternity the black hand and the white hand hold each other with equal clasp.

I saw for the first time the earth’s shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. The feelings which filled me I can express with one word-joy.

We ought even to hold as a fixed principle that what I see white I believe to be black, if the superior authorities define it to be so.

We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.

If you have the power to see things through somebody else’s eyes, it’s like going from black and white to color or two dimensions to three dimensions.

It could have been worse. I could have been born black.