Quotes About Injustice

You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress ...

It seems that some women love to be exploited. when they are not exploited, they exploit the man.

No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They're robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it's the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.

Where the really sincere white people have got to do their "proving" of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America's racism really is—and that's in their own home communities; America's racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work. Aside

A thousand ways every day, the white man is telling you You can't live here, you can't enter here, you can't eat here, drink here, walk here, work here, you can't ride here, you can't play here, you can't study here. Haven't we seen enough to see that he has no plan to *unite* with you?

Why is the American black man so complacent about being trampled upon? Why doesn't the American black man fight to be a human being?

No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition whites show towards me…as long as that same respect and recognition isn't shown towards everyone of our people in this country–it doesn't exist for me.

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

It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.

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.

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound.

Every addict takes junk to escape something, the Muslim explains. He explains that most black junkies really are trying to narcotize themselves against being a black man in the white man's America. But, actually, the Muslim says, the black man taking dope is only helping the white man to prove that the black man is nothing.

For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, 'Do you hate me?

All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system.

Anyway, now, each day I live as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do. When I am dead—I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form—I want you to just watch and see if I'm not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with "hate." He

America's racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.

When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, he can no longer pull wool over your eye so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth!

The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors--in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition!...It is a miracle that the the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught here in white man's heaven!

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the I.R.S. all combined can't turn up a thing I got, beyond a car to drive and a seven-room house to live in.

If it is all right for black people to be drafted and sent to Korea or South Vietnam or Laos or Berlin or someplace else to fight and die for the white man, then there is nothing wrong with that same black man doing the same thing when he is under the brutality in this country at the hands of the white man.

As long as you around here wearing the white men's name bragging about this so called democracy, you will always be looked down up, by the rest of the world.

Shorty felt about the war the same way I and most ghetto Negroes did: Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.

So we are all black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves.

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....