“There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.”

If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.

I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.

Truth is on the side of the oppressed.

In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.

Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.

Reform is for people who have government connections, revolution is for the people!

Everybody shall be accepted no matter what they stand for, you are not always going to agree on their faith.

People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.

In fact, once he is motivated no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom. I call myself the best example of that.

Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children.

A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

If not now then when, if not me then who?

Ignorance of each other is what has made unity impossible in the past.

If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

I wish to raise a Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black self.

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.

The industry looks for white actors and actresses, but it’s not the same for black actors. We have to really put the work in.

The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people – to black people.

My job is to be the constructive awakener of the black masses of the world so them know themself and others know what black people suppose to be and where.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

You are never too old to have a revelation.