There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.

Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war against Almighty God.

The ideals and principles for which Dr King fought have never been forgotten and are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago.

I am a strong believer that without justice, there is no peace. No lasting peace, anyway.

The Nation of Islam’s main focus was teaching black pride and self-awareness. Why should we keep trying to force ourselves into white restaurants and schools when white people didn’t want us? Why not clean up our own neighborhoods and schools instead of trying to move out of them and into white people’s neighborhoods?

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

I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

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.

To like an individual because he’s black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn’t white.

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

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.

And we have done more in the two and a half years that I’ve been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it’s ending ‚don’t ask, don’t tell,‘ making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples.

I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

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.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

It would make everything I worked for meaningless if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.

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.

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

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

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.

No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.

Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.

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.

That old law about ‚an eye for an eye‘ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

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.

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

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

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

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

If I decide to make a coat red in the show, it’s not just red, I think: is it communist red? Is it cherry cordial? Is it ruby red? Or is it apple red? Or the big red balloon red?

If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.

I used to always fight for human rights. I still fight for Leonard Peltier, who’s spent 35 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, and anti-racism.

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

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that’s something that we should think about.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

I like Gramsci. He’s an important person.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

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.

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

We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.

In terms of my involvement in ‚don’t ask, don’t tell‘ and marriage equality and anti-bullying and social emotional learning in schools – these are all things that arise out of my relationship with the world and with my fans.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

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.

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

We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

A gender line… helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

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

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.