Any time you throw your weight behind a political party that controls two thirds of the government and that party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election time and you’re dumb...

I am a Muslim, because it’s a religion that teaches you an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It teaches you to respect everybody, and treat everybody right. But it also...

History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals.

I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and...

You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.

One day, may we all meet together in the light of understanding.

This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn’t gambling, he’s cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would...

There is nothing in our book, the Qur’an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a...

Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.

Anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business – you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.

You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker

Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven’t done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how...

I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being–neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just...

You can’t have capitalism without racism.

The only way we’ll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba — yes Cuba too.

Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, fromBirth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an...

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

When the meat platter was passed to me, I didn’t even know what the meat was; usually, you couldn’t tell, anyway-but it was suddenly as though _don’t eat any more pork_ flashed on a screen...