“Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition…I believe that whoever tries to think things through honestly will soon recognize how unworthy and even fatal is the traditional bias against Negroes.” -Albert Einstein
“My fight in the boxing ring was only to make me popular. I never enjoyed boxing. I never enjoyed hurting people, knocking people down. But this world only recognizes power, wealth, and fame- according to their procedures.” -Muhammad Ali
“We can’t look to the enemy to validate us. That’s not their job. That’s not what we do. They only validate us when we’re wrong. When we’re at our worse.” – Anthony Browder
“You can watch a documentary of someone’s entire life on their phone. We live in a world where, increasingly, nothing remains secret. And one of the signs of true wealth and power may end up being that privacy will become a commodity only for those who have the serious money to buy it. For everybody else, all the world really will be a stage, with all the people on it self-consciously playing their role.” -Chloe Combi [Source: National Geographic February 2018]
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set a timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
“The outstanding and most prominent of man’s beliefs are those which were forced upon him, or which he absorbed of his own volition, under highly emotionalized conditions, when his mind was receptive. Under such conditions, the evangelist can plant the idea of religion more deeply and permanently during an hour’s revival service than he could through years of training under ordinary conditions, when the mind was not in an emotionalized state.” -Napoleon Hill
“[America practices] socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
“The 1800s in America was a time when a few ruthless individuals gained most of the country’s wealth. Banker J.P. Morgan once refused a loan to the U.S. government because, he said, it lacked collateral. Cleveland’s John D. Rockefeller began his business career as an accountant, heading a firm that investigates the potential of oil investments. He told his own employees there was no future in oil, then wholeheartedly invested in the natural resource himself.” -From, “Indian Summer” By: Brian McDonald
“Ours is a society in which the actor is more important than the real-life hero the actor portrays.” -Randall Robinson
“As he ran my papers, I was reminded of the armed white men, dubbed ‘pattie rollers’ by African Americans, who were deployed throughout the South to patrol and prevent slave rebellions. These patrols, which white men in the South were required to serve in, operated exclusively at night, traveling on horseback from plantation to plantation, harassing black people, looking for contraband (weapons, liquor, books, etc.) that might indicate a plan to flee. Pattie rollers were instructed to lash viciously any enslaved African without a written pass. In North Carolina, a law ordered pattie rollers to whip on the spot any “loose, disorderly, or suspected person” found among enslaved Africans. It was from these pattie rollers, funded by local taxes, that many modern policing concepts were derived. For example, pattie rollers, like modern police, referred to patrollers’ designated areas of operation as ‘beats.’” -M.K. Asante