I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that changed their abortion laws before Roe are not going to change back. So we have a policy that only affects poor women, and it can never be otherwise.

We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‚our‘ country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

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

Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?

They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated on the job.

You’ve got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it… Never.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

I’ve been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

For years, decades, the system has taught us to stay quiet. They’ve made us believe that those who take to the streets to speak up are crazy, criminals, troublemakers.

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

When a father puts in long hours at work, he’s praised for being dedicated and ambitious. But when a mother stays late at the office, she’s sometimes accused of being selfish, neglecting her kids.

It’s a well-known fact that tall people are evil.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

My protest about the post exchange seating bore some results. More seats were allocated for blacks, but there were still separate sections for blacks and for whites. At least I had made my men realize that something could be accomplished by speaking out, and I hoped they would be less resigned to unjust conditions.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‚race‘ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the constitution of India. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

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.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.

Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa, and if we’re honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

I believe that a child going without an education is a crime.

We don’t want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful – not only to that member of the community but the entire community.

Unions did in fact build the middle class. And here’s what that did. That built the United States of America as we know it.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?