Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

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

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.

You show me a black man who isn't an extremist and I'll show you one who needs psychiatric attention.

Truth is on the side of the oppressed.

American civil rights leader, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Lynching is a murder. For the past four hundred years our people have been lynched physically, but now it's done politically. We're lynched politically, we're lynched economically, we're lynched socially, we're lynched in every way that you can imagine.

The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.

My alma mater was books, a good library. ... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it.

You can't separate peace from freedom, because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.