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

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 became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

Yeah, that's what kind of, we get the idea a little bit yeah, because other people from different countries also try as hard as they can to get a medal or a gold medal in the Olympic Games. And you know, if they can work hard, we can work hard as well.

What's fascinating is that when you write a script, it's almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you're not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

I also do not like the idea of soft money, these issue ads - people don't know where the money is coming from, millions and millions of dollars outside of the control of a candidate - there's no accountability.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

Then I decided I couldn't just crawl in the corner and die, so I started putting pen to paper and wrote some songs. I had no idea what for or who I was going to work with. I tried to find my way and direction.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

The idea of licking stamps seemed great fun for me.

Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think.

It's slightly complicated for people to grasp the idea of a head of state in human form.

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

So my idea of neurotic is spending too much time trying to correct a wrong. When I feel that I'm doing that, then I snap out of it.

I'm into the idea of responsibility and edification and these things have found me and I have found them. I wanted to be in the movie and I made it known to Mike.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

Many of the Europeans who want Israel to go away don't even know why they do. Nearly a third of those interviewed concede they have no idea what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about. It's enough to know that Israelis are Jews.

It was an idea we had when Al was in the Senate - to organize and moderate an annual conference that would look at government policy through the lens of the family to help identify ways that the family can be supported and strengthened.

Growing up in Hollywood it seemed like every kid was the child of some star. We had no idea that other people would think we were special, because there was no other lifestyle to compare it to.

When employers tell me they prefer married men, and encourage their men to have homes of their own, because it makes them so much steadier, I wonder if they have any idea of all that that implies.

As a matter of fact they'd blacken us down. I guess there's a reason that according to what the Caucasian wanted us to look like. He wanted us to look-if we were Black, then he had his idea of what we look like.