“You are either free or not free”

“Either you are a citizen or you are not a citizen at all. If you are citizen, you are free; if you're not a citizen you are a slave.”

“Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." 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.”

“As long as you are convinced you have never done anything, you can never do anything.”

“How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what is yours?”

“Anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business - you know they're doing something that you aren't.”

“It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.”