The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.

Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.

I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

There's no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively - I am one with the people.

If you stop struggling, then you stop life.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.

Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

I have the people behind me and the people are my strength.

The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.

I didn't get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.

I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

Malcolm X was the first political person in this country that I really identified with. If he had lived and not been purged, I probably would have joined the Muslims.

My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he's just started to understand that something's wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn't bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.

No one can say, 'I have dropped out - I am no longer in the system.' When you're in prison, you're even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don't transform the system as an absolute thing.

The first book I ever really read was Plato's 'Republic,' and then I had to go over that five times or something.

We've never advocated violence; violence is inflicted upon us. But we do believe in self-defense for ourselves and for black people.

You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree's fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down - bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.

The nature of a panther is that he never attacks. But if anyone attacks or backs into a corner, the panther comes up to wipe that aggressor or that attacker out.

If You Stop Struggling Then You Stop Life

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

And the basis on which we agreed to operate with them involved a manifesto, where it states that we proceed from different ideologies and policies. One thing that we insisted on was that they should take an oath to reject racism and discrimination.

Racism is a refuge for the ignorant. It seeks to divide and to destroy. It is the enemy of freedom, and deserves to be met head-on and stamped out.

Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.' Wouldn't they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism.

Using the power you derive from the discovery of the truth about racism in South Africa, you will help us to remake our part of the world into a corner of the globe on which all - of which all of humanity can be proud.

Violence and racism are bad. Whenever they occur they are to be condemned and we should not turn a blind eye to them.

Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.

Everybody's scared for their ass. There aren't too many people ready to die for racism. They'll kill for racism but they won't die for racism.

My answer to those who oppose my appointment as CEO is that this is really a decision of the YWCA. They want to strengthen their grassroots to advocate on behalf of women's and children's empowerment and ending racism.

The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.

People have been killing because of racial differences since the time of Adam and Eve, but in this country racism has been primarily aimed at African Americans.

Racism cannot be cured solely by attacking some of the results it produces, like discrimination in housing or in education.

As much as everyone wants to downplay racism, it exists. There's a great mistrust among some African-Americans of white people.

I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.

I was born and raised in the oldest settled part of the nation and in an environment in which racism was officially mooted.

Sometimes I feel like rap music is almost the key to stopping racism.

In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.

If only Al Sharpton were around, Lincoln would have known he was a victim of racism.

Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.

Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.