A calling is you feel – you look out and see the need – maybe it’s the need for the poor, to help poor people. Maybe it’s the need to get involved in the race problem, as Martin Luther King was – felt called.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

I will not sit in a room with black people when the N word is used. I know it was meant to belittle a person, so I will not sit there and have that poison put on me. Now a black person can say, ‚Oh, you know, I can use this word because I’m black.‘

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law.

I’ve rarely kept my distance from kind of – I don’t know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, ‚Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.‘

I don’t think marriage is a civil right, but I think that being able to transfer property is a civil right.

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin‘ hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.

Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.

Every person above the ordinary has a certain mission that they are called to fulfill.

The purpose is clear. It is safety with solvency. The country is entitled to both.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known – the plantations – because they attempted to exercise their ‚democratic‘ right to vote.

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother’s Keeper, I’m personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

I can’t believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

The man who could go to Africa and rob her of her children, and then sell them into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hand.

Favor comes because for a brief moment in the great space of human change and progress some general human purpose finds in him a satisfactory embodiment.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

You were not created to just get by with an average, unrewarding, or unfulfilling life. God created you to leave your mark on this generation.

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.

To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.

The women of my generation and my daughter’s generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.

Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?

I don’t want to make money; I want to make a difference.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.

Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that’s been discriminated against, knows what it’s like.

Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God’s creation, woman, the object of our lust.

God didn’t make me to make movies, flex muscles, buy gold. What you love the most becomes your God… If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

We must make it clear that a platform of ‚I hate gay men and women‘ is not a way to become president of the United States.

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.

You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college. And, you know, part of my job, that I can do, I think, without any potential conflicts, is to get at those root causes.

As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

So long as our Corps fields such Marines, America has nothing to fear from tyrants, be they Fascists, Communists or Tyrants with Medieval Ideology. For we serve in a Corps with no institutional confusion about our purpose: To fight! To fight well!

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

It’s empowering to know I am doing something, I am taking a stand, I am disrupting.