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.

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

Trouble brews when we steal from the poor and give to the rich.

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

I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.

My family kinda hit the skids. We were experiencing poverty at that point. We all got a job, where the whole family had to work as security guards and janitors. And I just got angry.

Fixing a broken immigration system. Protecting our kids from gun violence. Equal pay for equal work, paid leave, raising the minimum wage. All these things still matter to hardworking families; they are still the right thing to do; and I will not let up until they get done.

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

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.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

I believe God wants you to have money to pay your bills, send your kids to college and do charity work and build orphanages. There’s the teaching that we’re supposed to be poor to show that we’re humble. I don’t buy that. I think we’re supposed to be leaders. We’re supposed to excel.

We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King’s success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.

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

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

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We’re standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

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

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.

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?

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.

America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free. We sent a generation to college. We cultivated the most educated workforce in the world.

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

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

If you’re white and you’re wrong, then you’re wrong; if you’re black and you’re wrong, you’re wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green – God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.

DACA recipients risk a lot to come out of the shadows & sign up, but many will tell you the risk is worth being able to live and work in the only country they’ve ever known as home. DACA recipients serve in our military, work in Fortune 100 companies, and conduct important medical research.

I always knew who I was, and I always ran from my true purpose… I know what my job is. And I always ran from it.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

For me, education has never been simply a policy issue – it’s personal. Neither of my parents and hardly anyone in the neighborhood where I grew up went to college. But thanks to a lot of hard work and plenty of financial aid, I had the opportunity to attend some of the finest universities in this country.

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

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

I don’t believe in colleges and universities.

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

The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.

I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It’s not academic for me.

Where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world.

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

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

Those who ‚abjure‘ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

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

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

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.

My son Emilio is running for Congress to continue the fight for social justice.

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I’m innocent. You’ve got to believe I’m innocent. If you don’t, take my job.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

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

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

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

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

When I was in college my girl got me a job at the doctor’s office she was working at. I was a file clerk. No disrespect but I don’t think a man can do that job. It takes so much meticulous and precise file-keeping.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

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

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

A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

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.