Quotes About Activism

If ballots won't work, bullets will.

Whether you use bullets or ballots, you've got to aim well; don't strike at the puppet, strike at the puppeteer.

And concerning anything in this society involved in helping Negroes, the federal government shows an inability to function. But it can function in South Vietnam, in the Congo, in Berlin, and in other places where it has no business. But it can't function in Mississippi.

How is the black man going to get 'civil rights' before he first wins his human rights?

By Any Means Necessary; The Chickens Come Home To Roost.

I've had enough of someone else's propaganda. I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

When you have an organization that's neither political nor religious and doesn't take part in the civil rights struggle, what can it call itself? It's in a vacuum.

Look at yourselves. Some of you teenagers, students. How do you think I feel and I belong to a generation ahead of you - how do you think I feel to have to tell you, 'We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its human rights - and you've got to be born into a society where you still have that same fight.' What did we do, who preceded you? I'll tell you what we did. Nothing. And don't you make the same mistake we made....

The well-meaning white people, I said, had to combat, actively and directly, the racism in other white people. And

a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.

His views about the white man were devastating, but at no time did he transgress against my own personality and make me feel that I, as an individual, shared in the guilt. He attributed the degradation of the Negro people to the white man. He denounced integration as a fraud. He contended that if the leaders of the established civil rights organizations persisted, the social struggle would end in bloodshed because he was certain the white man would never concede full integration.

If you're afraid of black nationalism, you're afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.

Speaking like this doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression.

For the freedom of my 22 million black brothers and sisters here in America, I do believe that I have fought the best that I knew how, and the best that I could, with the shortcomings that I have had. I know that my shortcomings are many.

I have learned to hate every drop of white rapist blood that is in me

Our slave foreparents would have been put to death for advocating so-called 'integration' with the white man. Now when Mr. Muhammad speaks of 'separation,' the white man calls us 'hate-teachers' and 'fascists'!

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If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading.

John Viscount Morley.

You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

Lucky Thompson and Milt Jackson

They called me 'the angriest Negro in America.' I wouldn't deny that charge. I spoke exactly as I felt. 'I believe in anger. The Bible says there is a time for anger.

And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy – all we've seen is hypocrisy.

I think the white man has to face the fact that black people in this country are tired of sitting around waiting for the white man to make up his mind that we are human beings.