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

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.

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.

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.

Pig power in America was infuriating, but pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable.

The most revolutionary statement in history is love thine enemy.

With all its faults, the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.

Too much agreement kills chat.

Every time I embrace a black woman I’m embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I’m hugging freedom.