“We didn’t have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next.”

Knowing what must be done does away with fear.

Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die – the dream of freedom and peace.

I will no longer act on the outside in a way that contradicts the truth that I hold deeply inside. I will no longer act as if I were less than the whole person I know myself inwardly to be.

I had decided that I would not go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors. I had made that decision myself, as an individual.

Nothing in the Golden Rule says that others will treat us as we have treated them. It only says that we must treat others in a way that we would want to be treated.

I want to be treated like a human being.

If I stayed angry at other people, I would miss finding friends among those I was angry with.

Why do you all push us around?

As long as we have bigotry and crime, we have work to do.

I was a person with dignity and self-respect, and I should not set my sights lower than anybody else just because I was black.

As long as people use tactics to oppress or restrict other people from being free, there is work to be done.

There is work to do; that is why I cannot stop or sit still.

I see the energy of young people as a real force for positive change.

Black women are very capable of leading our organizations. I believe that firmly.

You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.

People need to free their minds of all racial prejudice.

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards.

Even in the best and most peacefully civilized countries many occasions arise when a woman versed in the knowledge and use of fire arms may find that information and skill of great importance.

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

The whites, who are educated and civilized, swindle me, and I am not hard to swindle because I do not know how to read and write.

Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.

The most base of men can be civilized through suffering.