Human Rights Activist Quotes

“Imagine that -- a country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom and all of that kind of stuff when they want to draft you and put you in the army and send you to Saigon to fight for them -- and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you're going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, that's the most hypocritical government since the world began!”

“No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already ... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.”

“Only in this form of separation the black man is exploited. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that we should be separate, all right, but in this separate state or separate existence, the black man should be given the opportunity and the incentive to do for himself what the white man has done for himself.”

“One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.”

“If it's necessary to form a Black Nationalist army, we'll form a Black Nationalist army. It'll be ballot or the bullet. It'll be liberty or it'll be death.”

“Instead of working for white man and helping him hold up a government that continues to suppress us socially and, and exploit us economically and oppress us politically, let us go and enter our own territory and use our own talents to uplift ourselves by our own bootstraps. And then he will recognize us for what we are.”

“Why should [Uncle Sam] send 20 billion dollars down there [South America], which is going to go down the drain every time you have a racial in - incident in this country?”

“Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”

“Foreign diplomats could have modeled their conduct on the way the Negro postmen, Pullman porters, and dining car waiters of Roxbury [Massachusetts] acted, striding around as if they were wearing top hats and cutaways.”

“I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.”

“Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet.”

“The Constitution of the United States of America clearly affirms the right of every American citizen to bear arms. And as Americans, we will not give up a single right guaranteed under the Constitution.”

“Any time Uncle Sam, with all his machinery for warfare, is held to a draw by some rice eaters, he's lost the battle.”

“The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in America.”

“When the Muslims deliver the indictment of the American system, it is not the white man per se that is being doomed.”

“What does a black man look like begging for a cup of coffee in a white restaurant, and doesn't have a job to back up his - to pay for it when, when - when he does get the coffee? It's putting the cart before the horse.”

“If the Emancipation Proclamation was authentic, you wouldn't have a race problem.”

“First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I'm inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word "revolution" loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind.”

“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.”

“If you have an all-white neighborhood you don't call it a segregated neighborhood. But you call an all-black neighborhood a segregated neighborhood. And why? Because the segregated neighborhood is the one that's controlled by the ou - from the outside by others, but a separate neighborhood is a neighborhood that is independent, it's equal, it can do - it can stand on its own two feet, such as the neighborhood. It's an independent, free neighborhood, free community.”

“My suspicious nature is that there's something that [ Reverend ] Galamison, about Galamison that must have some good in it or some right in it.”

“White America is in the minority.”

“[ Negro leaders] never let the white man know exactly what black people are thinking.”

“The Chinese in this country aren't asking for integration.”

“We reject segregation even more militantly than you say you do! We want separation, which is not the same! The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that segregation is when your life and liberty are controlled, regulated, by someone else. To segregate means to control. Segregation is that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. But separation is that which is done voluntarily, by two equals - for the good of both!”