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

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 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.

Negroes must be free in order to be equal, and they must be equal in order to be free.

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.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, then throw my ass in jail.

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

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill revolution, you can jail a liberator but you can’t jail liberation.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.