Peoples do not defy repression and death, nor do they remain for nights on end protesting energetically, just because of merely formal matters.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

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

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God’s waiting room.

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

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

And so I have studied, I have to tell you, revolutions and uprisings for a long time. They are all slightly different, but what they all look for is some kind of a mechanism to go from an authoritarian system to an open, democratic system.

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.

They died hard, those savage men – like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

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?

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can’t or won’t see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married – we became an interracial couple.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

How happy had it been for me had I been slain in the battle. It had been far more noble to have died the victim of the enemy than fall a sacrifice to the rage of my friends.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.

On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.

What we live by we die by.

I’m not anti-middle-class in the slightest. Look at me! I am very pro people putting time and money and effort into trying to improve the world.

There’s something about death that is comforting. The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to appreciate your life now.

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.

The Soviet Union, the socialist camp, the People’s Republic of China, and North Korea helped us resist, with essential supplies and weapons, the implacable blockade of the United States, the most powerful empire ever to exist.

Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities.

Print some money and give it to us for the rain forests.

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

Whether you like it or not, you’re forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don’t fear death, I’m a fatalist. I believe when it’s your time, that’s it. It’s the hand you’re dealt.

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

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

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.

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.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

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.

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

My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression – thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.

From an eternal perspective, the only death that is truly premature is the death of one who is not prepared to meet God.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

Every loss of life is terrible.

I have already demonstrated, by crucial tests, the practicability of signaling by my system from one to any other point of the globe, no matter how remote, and I shall soon convert the disbelievers.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

The death of Abdel Nasser on September 28, 1970, was an irreversible setback for Egypt.

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.

Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.