Quotes from Dick Gregory

I never learned hate at home or shame. I had to go to school for that.

If they took all the drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine off the market for six days, they'd have to bring out the tanks to control you.

The only good thing about the good old days is they're gone.

Dear Momma?Wherever you are, if ever you hear the word nigger again, remember they are advertising my book.

Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten.

I was learning that just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

Momma, a welfare cheater. A criminal who couldn't stand to se her kids go hungry, or grow up in slumbs and end up mugging people in dar corners. I guess the system didn't want her to get off relief, the way it kept sending social workers around to be sure Momma wasn't trying to make things better.

I personally believe breathatarianism to be the highest mode of human living [...] breathing in pure air, absorbing the direct light and energies of the sun, bathing in pure water [...] I look at the obituaries every morning and ain't nobody listed but you eaters.

Makes you wonder. When I left St. Louis, I was making five dollars a night. Now I'm getting $5,000 a week — for saying the same things out loud I used to say under my breath.

Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant. This white waitress came up to me and said, 'We don't serve colored people here.' I said, 'That's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.' About that time, these three cousins came in. You know the ones I mean, Ku, Klux and Klan. They said, 'Boy, we're givin' you fair warnin. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you.' So I put down my knife and fork, picked up that chicken, and kissed it.

When you have a good mother and no father, God kind of sits in. It's not good enough, but it helps. But I got tired of hearing Momma say, God, fix it so I can pay the rent; God, fix it so the lights will be turned on; God, fix it so the pot is full. I kind of felt it really wasn't His job.

Can you imagine what this old Negro had to go through? Can you imagine the day a Negro woman went to a black man and said: "Honey, I'm pregnant," and both of them fell on their knees and prayed that their baby would be born deformed? Can you imagine what this Negro went through, hoping his baby is born crippled? Because if he was born crippled, he would have less chance of being a slave and more chance of having freedom.

Every door of racial prejudice I can kick down, is one less door that my children have to kick down.

They told me there was very little racial prejudice in Hawaii. Like a woman is just a little bit pregnant.

We have problems all over the world today, because men cease to be individuals. We like to identify with everything other than ourselves. We like to identify with groups, races, religions, you hear it every day. 'I'm Italian! I'm German! I'm Negro! I'm Jewish!' So what? Do you realize that when you identify with anything other than yourself, first as an individual, you have a cheap way out a lot of your own shortcomings?

Even though he understood the depths of racism and black oppression, Ali lived his life as a free man—a free loving and lovable man.

Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it

What I've come to learn in my long life is that ignorance is not bliss; it is time consuming and costly as hell.

When you shoot right and truth and justice down, the more right and truth and justice will rise up.

Home was a place to be only when all other places were closed.

I guess that makes me as white as you now, boy. I got your spit inside me.

Did you know that in New Orleans they still have brown bag parties? What's that, you ask? You and I go to a party, and when we get to the door, there's a brown bag hanging down from the ceiling, and if our skin is darker than the brown bag, we can't go in.

Survey Graphic

The free man is the man with no fears.