Elijah Muhammad Quotes

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

Every star may be a sun to someone.

In [Ralph] Ellison's case, it's more psychological than it is phenomenal, and it's conditioned by anger, animosity, and lack of desire to engage with the black body. There was always simultaneity that had nothing to do with visuality. You can be there and not be there at the same time and be fully visible all the time. That's what really struck me about Ellison .

In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you've got to be a girl.

My experience has to be funnelled through a black experience or a white experience, or it doesn't exist, because that's how we're going to deal with the world.

By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun.

A black Christian is like a black person with no memory.

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

Yes, of course, black Americans are a special group, and I'm disappointed that they're not Republicans, given our traditions. We're not getting much love in return, despite our efforts.

If you are a black woman, you get two history months in a row.

I'm sorry that I did not become the world's first black classic pianist. I think I would have been happier.

I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.

I come in with this rock 'n' roll-oriented music, and it's not black enough . . . I've always had to deal with this black-white thing.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

When I first started comedy, me and my friends were kids. I claim - although I know that it's a spurious and probably untrue claim - that we were the first generation of kids to act black.

Is the work of sun worshippers to honor those who think they can see the sun? Or to worship the sun?

If I told you God was black, what would you think of that?

You know how we'd get along better? If everybody'd just remember how we're all related. White, black, Asian, skin. No difference. All the bloodlines go back to that one old mama in Africa.

Race I've been studying since I knew there was a problem with race and that I was Black and something was wrong. Gender, is very new to me. All I can say is this is something that I'm going to take hold of and pray about it.

I see other black women imitate my style, which is no style at all, but just letting our hair be itself. They call it the Afro Look.

Honey, you [Michael Jackson] gotta pick a race first. All of a sudden you're a black man, then you're Diana Ross, now you're Audrey Hepburn. Then he's got the little beard going on. He's like Lord of the Rings, the entire cast. Michael's about to jump species.

I'm just as white as I am black, and I'm just as Russian Jew as I am West Indian.

I think it's important to realize that I was actually black before the election.

Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.