Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach. Then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.
My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he's just started to understand that something's wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn't bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.
Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.
The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.
You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree's fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down - bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.
Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.
I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.
I didn't get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.
There's no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively - I am one with the people.
The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
No one can say, 'I have dropped out - I am no longer in the system.' When you're in prison, you're even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don't transform the system as an absolute thing.
The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.
I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.
The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.
Malcolm X was the first political person in this country that I really identified with. If he had lived and not been purged, I probably would have joined the Muslims.
We've never advocated violence; violence is inflicted upon us. But we do believe in self-defense for ourselves and for black people.
You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.
I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.
The first book I ever really read was Plato's 'Republic,' and then I had to go over that five times or something.
If you stop struggling, then you stop life.
