Human Rights Activist Quotes

“I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner.”

“This is why integration will not work. It assumes that the two races, black and white, are equal and can be made to live as one. This is not true.”

“I think teaching a man to hate himself is much more criminal than teaching a man to hate someone else.”

“Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.”

“I might add, the whites who came here only say 50 years ago as immigrants have come into this country, they have set up businesses. They've developed these businesses into an industry.”

“When 'I' replaced with 'We', even the illness becomes wellness.”

“If you're born in America with a black skin, you're born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.”

“Policies change, and programs change, according to time.But objective never changes. You might change your method of achieving the objective, but the objective never changes. Our objective is complete freedom, complete justice, complete equality, by any means necessary”

“I think the black man in America wants to be recognized as a human being; and it's almost impossible for one who has enslaved another to bring himself to accept the person who used to pull his plow, who used to be an animal, subhuman, who used to be considered as such by him-it's almost impossible for that person in his right mind to accept that person as his equal.”

“I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin.”

“The real names of our people were destroyed during slavery. The last name of my forefathers was taken from them when they were brought to America and made slaves, and then the name of the slave master was given, which we refuse, we reject that name today and refuse it. I never acknowledge it whatsoever.”

“Nowhere in history has the white man been brotherly toward anyone.”

“If you are not willing to pay the price for freedom, you don't deserve freedom.”

“How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what's already yours?”

“I don't think that the objective of the American negro is white middle-class values because what are white middle-class values?”

“We have a common enemy. We have this in common: We have a common oppressor, a common exploiter, and a common discriminator. But once we all realize that we have this common enemy, then we unite on the basis of what we have in common. And what we have foremost in common is that enemy - the white man. He's an enemy to all of us. I know some of you all think that some of them aren't enemies. Time will tell.”

“Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.”

“True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.”

“You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can't hate Africa and not hate yourself.”

“Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.”

“You're going to have a racial explosion, and a racial explosion is more dangerous than an atomic explosion. It's going to explode because black people are dissatisfied; they're dissatisfied not only with the white man, but they're dissatisfied with these Negroes who have been sitting around here posing as leaders and spokesmen for black people and actually making the problem worse instead of making the problem better.”

“The short-range involves the long-range. Immediate steps have to be taken to reeducate our people into the, a more real view of political, economic, and social conditions in this country, and our ability in, in a self- improvement program to gain control politically over every community in which we predominate, and also over the economy of that same community as here in Harlem. Instead of all the stores in Harlem being owned by white people, they should be owned and operated by black people.”

“I admire the, the stand of China and the stand of Mao Tse- tung, but I can't admire with respect the stand of, of Nehru in India. I just can't do it.”

“One of the tricks of the west is to use or create images, they create images of a person who doesn't go along with their views and then they make certain that this image is distasteful, and then anything that that person has to say from thereon, from thereon in, is rejected.”

“I don't know - too much about Robert Williams tactics, but if he was trying to defend himself, he was within his God-given rights and within - and he was also within his natural right, because first law of nature is self-preservation.”