“All the gods are dead except the god of war.”

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.

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.

Sadness that is caused by the absence of love is deadly for the heart.

Oh darling, if the universe would need the love of us careless humans to keep its restless heart alive the sky would be full of dead stars.

Nobody loves you till you dead that when they might care.

A horse which stops dead just before a jump and thus propels its rider into a graceful arc provides a splendid excuse for general merriment.

There are thousands of very, very talented artists who will never be known, even after they are dead.

I’m lucky. Usually you’re dead to get your own museum, but I’m still alive to see mine.

Perhaps the earth can teach us As when everything seems dead And later proves to be alive.

We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.