Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can cuss out colonialism, imperialism, and all other kinds of ism, but it's hard for you to cuss that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, your soul goes.
Until the white man in America sits down and talks with The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, he won't even know what the race problem - what makes the race problem what it is.
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?
Since integration is so slow, and the white man knows the problem must be solved, the only thing that he can do tomorrow is, is separate, because we're already separated.
[Negro] should realize that he is living in a war zone, and he is at war with an enemy that is as vicious and criminal and inhuman as any war-making country has ever been.
I think you'll find also that if the negro ever realizes that he should begin to fight for real for his freedom, there are many whites who will fight on his side with him.
Don't you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who's depriving you of your rights. They're not your friends, no, they're your enemies. Treat them like that.
Ten guards and the warden couldn't have torn me out of those books. Months passed without even thinking about being imprisoned....I had never been so truly free in my life.
Don't be bitter. Remember Lot's wife when they kill me, and they surely will. You have to use all of your energy to do what it is you have to do. [To his wife Betty Shabazz]
The American Negro has no conception of the hundreds of millions of other non-whites' concern for him: he has no conception of their feeling of brotherhood for and with him.
My black brothers and sisters - of all religious beliefs, or of no religious beliefs - we all have in common the greatest binding tie we could have. We are all black people!
There seems in most countries to be either one extreme or the other. Truly a paradise could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values could be properly balanced.
I believe in Islam. I am a Muslim and there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, nothing wrong with the religion of Islam. It just teaches us to believe in Allah as the God.
I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.
Now the goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who has brutalized them for four hundred years.
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.
It's easy. [Black man] is - he's separate already. The fact that you have Harlem, the fact that you have the Negro ghetto and the so-called Negro slum, he's already separate.
The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.
Those type of whites who are always going to jail with Negroes are the ones who tell Negroes to be loving and be kind and be patient and be nonviolent and turn the other cheek.
I am a Muslim and . . . my religion makes me be against all forms of racism. It keeps me from judging any man by the color of his skin. It teaches me to judge him by his deeds .
Any time you put too many sparks around a powder keg, the thing is going to explode, and if the things that explodes is still inside the house, then the house will be destroyed.
We were truly all the same (brothers) - because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the white from their behavior, and the white from their attitude.
In the Bible, God offered the Pharaoh freedom if he would just let the oppressed people free to go to the land of milk and honey. But the Pharaoh disobeyed, and he was destroyed.
Now, the black man here was so-called free by [Abe] Lincoln 100 years ago. The black man in America has an - has a purchasing power of 20 billion dollars. Now, and he's educated.
We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as free humans in this society.
The black people in this country are taught that their religion and the best religion is the religion of Islam, and when one accepts the religion of Islam, he's known as a Muslim.
My beliefs are now one hundred percent against racism and segregation in any form and I also believe that we don't judge a person by the color of his skin but rather by his deeds.
I have gone through the process of re-evaluating, giving a personal re-evaluation to everything that I ever believed and that I did believe while I was a, a member and a minister.
It isn't the American white man who is a racist, but it's the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.
I find it difficult [to believe] that... Christians accuse [Black Muslims] of teaching racial supremacy or... hatred, because their own history and... teachings are filled with it.
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.
We are fighting for the right to live as free humans in this society. In fact, we are actually fighting for rights that are even greater than civil rights and that is human rights.
And what makes the whites who have these middle-class values have those values? Where did they get it? They didn't have these same values four hundred years, five hundred years ago.
Well, the white race in America is the same way. As individuals it is impossible for them to escape the collective crime committed against the Negroes in this country, collectively.
The Negro neighborhood, which is inferior, is begging for a chance to - integrate itself into that which is - is superior, which is not going to happen. It's going to cause trouble.
I look at the problem of the twenty-two million Afro-Americans as being a problem that's so broad in scope that it's almost impossible for any organization to see it in its entirety.
When a man understands who he is, who God is, who the devil is... then he can pick himself up out of the gutter; he can clean himself up and stand up like a man should before his God.
I admire a man who fights a battle against opposition, and if there wasn't something about [Reverend] Galamison that the people, I notice that the power structure is against Galamison.
Soon now, as the Negro awakens a little more and sees the vise that he's in, sees the bag that he's in, sees the real game that he's in, then the Negro's going to develop a new tactic.
We would do the same thing that America did when the Jap[an] - when, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. America defended itself. They said praise the Lord, but they passed the ammunition.
We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be the victims of God's divine wrath.
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.
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.
The thing that has made the so-called Negro in America fail, more than any other thing, is your, my, lack of knowledge concerning history. We know less about history than anything else.
It is only the Negro leadership, the bourgeois, hand-picked, handful of Negroes who think that they're going to get some kind of respect, recognition, or protection from the Government.
On the Iberian Peninsula in the Spanish-Portuguese area, southern France that high state of a culture existed there because of Africans known as Moors had come there and brought it there.
We're not Americans, we're Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock - that rock landed on us.
A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.
The man was a deceiver. He was deceitful and I will never bite my tongue in saying that. I don't think he was anything but a politician, and he used Negroes to get elected and to get votes.
When I said [ I would work with any organization] I would make the, the reservation that I would work with any organization as long as it didn't make us compromise our religious principles.