“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.”

All the gods are dead except the god of war.

Respect commands itself and it can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.

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.

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

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.

I have black friends, but I don’t just hang out with black kids. I might pull up with Indian kids, white kids, black kids, whatever.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

I used to get letters saying, ‘I didn’t know black children and white children were the same.’

How many thick black women are there singing whatever I’m singing, surrounded by rappers, but also from the suburbs? I can’t really judge someone else for judging me!

I performed in high school for Black History Month at a talent show, but besides that, I didn’t have the resources to perform so I spent my time as a teenager writing music.

War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.

It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn’t stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.

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.