Muhammad Ali Quotes

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.

Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn't shake but inside I was shaking.

My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.

I’ve never been involved in a Civil Rights campaign that was not ill-timed

The Ballot or the Bullet

He apologizes for injustice …. Belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions…. He should be unceasingly and firmly opposed.

I had felt for a long time that, if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.

MLK, Jr. taught me how to say no to segregation, and I can hear him saying now... when you straighten up your back, no man can ride you. He said stand up straight and say no to racial discrimination.

It is an insult for me to have been alive through the times you are calling the so-called civil rights movement. I don't celebrate my humiliations and my insults.

It's always important, when we experience injustice in this nation, that people in power understand that we will not take that injustice quietly.

We have to fight for what's right the same way the brothers and sisters that came before us did. The ultimate example, and there are many others, was The Stonewall Inn. They were pushed until they could take no more.

I'm not a docile, complacent person when it comes to racial aggressions.

My grandmother had been a part of the civil rights movement.

I came back to Louisville after the Olympics with my shiny gold medal. Went into a luncheonette where black folks couldn't eat. Thought I'd put them on the spot. I sat down and asked for a meal. The Olympic champion wearing his gold medal. They said, "We don't serve niggers here." I said, "That's okay, I don't eat 'em." But they put me out in the street. So I went down to the river, the Ohio River, and threw my gold medal in it.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

The time for running has come to an end. You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.

When I first went to jail in 1960 with seven classmates trying to use their public library against the backdrop of my father being a veteran of World War II, not being able to use - having to sit behind Nazi on American military bases, I lost my fear of jails and death.

In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

Bobby Darin was one of the first to take black musicians on the road with his band, and there were places that didn't want him to play, and he stood up to it.