"You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't, you die. Or you don't die, but you don't live."

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

"The world is before you, and you need not take it, or suffer it, for what it is. You can also make it what it will be."

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be."

"The whole language of love, in this country, is terribly debased."