The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.

Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.

In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift - a more human face.

So as a prelude whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time.

Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.

Black man, you are on your own.

The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.

You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway.

It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realize that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality.

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

A Black man should be more independent and depend on himself for his freedom and not to take it for granted that someone would lead him to it. The blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that they should be playing. They want to do things for themselves and all by themselves.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.

Black Consciousness seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life.

I entered the University of Natal as a preliminary-year student in 1966 and stayed on to June 1972, when I was expelled from the university. I was then doing third-year medicine.

I would describe and I have described myself to people who ask as a freedom fighter.

If one is free at heart, no man-made chains can bind one to servitude, but if one's mind is so manipulated and controlled by the oppressor, then there will be nothing the oppressed can do to scare his powerful masters.

In a bid for change, we have to take off our coats, be prepared to lose our comfort and security, our jobs and positions of prestige, and our families... A struggle without casualties is no struggle.

The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.

The fact that apartheid has been tied up with white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and deliberate oppression makes the problem much more complex. Material want is bad enough, but coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.

The press is largely directed at white society or the so-called electorate whose values are laced with racial prejudice against black people.

The revolutionary sees his task as liberation not only of the oppressed but also of the oppressor. Happiness can never truly exist in a state of tension.

Tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security, and prestige, it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege.

We are concerned with that curious bunch of nonconformists who explain their participation in negative terms: that bunch of do-gooders that goes under all sorts of names - liberals, leftists, etc. These are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism and the country's 'inhumanity to the black man.'

We know that all interracial groups in South Africa are relationships in which whites are superior, blacks inferior. So as a prelude, whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.

Black consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time.

The oneness of community for instance is at the heart of our culture.

The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.

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.

A young man is stirred and stimulated by the consciousness of how much depends upon his own exertions: a young girl is oppressed by it.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Life is a state of consciousness.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.

You shall always find what you created in your mind, for instance, a benevolent God or an evil Devil. Between them are countless facets. Therefore, concentrate on the depth of your consciousness and on what you consider to be positive and good.

Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

And if I can take part in it by transforming my own consciousness, then someone else's, I'm happy to do it.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.

I believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in.

Malcolm X raised my consciousness about myself and my people and other people more than any person I know. I knew him before he became Malcolm X.

If any human being is to reach full maturity both the masculine and feminine sides of the personality must be brought up into consciousness.