We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

Men are what their mothers made them.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

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.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

My mom’s one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

Me and my dad are friends. We’re cool. I’ll never be disappointed again, because I don’t expect anything anymore from him. I just let him exist, and that’s how we get along.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

Say there’s a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter – for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that’s saying is that he’s living a fantasy life of rebellion.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

All women have a perception much more developed than men. So all women somehow, being repressed for so many millennia, they ended up by developing this sixth sense and contemplation and love. And this is something that we have a hard time to accept as part of our society.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

I think a lot of people love to convolute what everyone else does in order to disempower women.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

You can’t move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn’t mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother – but… when she became our child, the affection came.

Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

My daughter doesn’t even get my humor. She’s like, ‚Um, no. I don’t get it, Dad. Mmm, no, not that one, Dad.‘

I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God’s sake, not a television personality.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Regarding marriage, it – somehow, it didn’t happen. One fellow in such a big family not getting married is not an issue.

A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.

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.

To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane… There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

I’m not great at bedtime stories. Bedtime stories are supposed to put the kid to sleep. My kid gets riled up and then my wife has to come in and go, ‚All right! Get out of the room.‘

I came across few whites as a boy at Qunu. The local magistrate, of course, was white, as was the nearest shopkeeper. Occasionally, white travelers or policemen passed through our area. These whites appeared as grand as gods to me, and I was aware that they were to be treated with a mixture of fear and respect.

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

I’ve felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father’s family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.

Now that I’m a parent, I understand why my father was in a bad mood a lot.

Our modern society – especially in the West, and especially now – reveres youth.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven’t tried that for a while. Maybe this time it’ll work.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

The public doesn’t mind people living together without being married, providing they don’t overdo it.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t really speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

Your children will see what you’re all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Men don’t really like skinny, do they?

Sabotage did not involve loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Bitterness would be kept to a minimum and, if the policy bore fruit, democratic government could become a reality.

Chinese people need to be controlled; otherwise, they will do whatever they want.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

Everything the working class has been told to do, the rich do not do. That is my message.

I got a lot of support from my parents. That’s the one thing I always appreciated. They didn’t tell me I was being stupid; they told me I was being funny.

I’ve been called a moron since I was about four. My father called me a moron. My grandfather said I was a moron. And a lot of times when I’m driving, I hear I’m a moron. I like being a moron.

The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.

I don’t think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I’m enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.

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

There’s a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I’m affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much.