Muhammad Ali Quotes

I'd much rather people knew me as a good tennis player than as an aboriginal who happens to play good tennis. Of course I'm proud of my race, but I don't want to be thinking about it all the time.

Last night I had a dream. When I got to Africa, I had one hell of a rumble. I had to beat Tarzan's behind first, for claiming to be King of the Jungle.

Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!

I'm not white, I don't apologize for what my country did to become great

When you first leave Uganda for Europe you think, ‘At last, I'm free to do what I want’. But when you arrive there, you become an African for the first time, in a sense. Because you are responsible for Somalia! They call you up and say, ‘What do you think about Somalia?’ And you can't say, ‘I'm Ugandan, I have nothing to say about Somalia’. You have this big, huge chunk of experience to defend --and you will defend it, because nobody else is defending it. You become some sort of an ambassador and for the first time you become conscious of what Africa means.

Now we already know that the white supremacist Western scholars are going to object and oppose any evidence that shows an Afrikan influence on Greek civilization, or any other part of Europe. Their basic premise is to give Afrikan people credit for nothing

I just think you people (African Americans) would be happier back in Africa where you came from.

Why is the world that I see around me mixed, and why is the world I see in movies filled with all white people? Why does it have to be like that?

It's not enough even to have one black Barbie... because black women are not a monolith.

In South Africa, they think we're pygmies!

A lot of racism comes from projection. White Americans have a stereotype of black people being criminals purely because they can't acknowledge that it was actually white people that stole them from Africa in the first place.

If Adam Sandler does a bad movie, he doesn't bring down the whole white race. But if Tyler Perry does, it's like, 'See what you guys do?' and that type of thing.

It's people who look like me, just seeing representation of everyone. I didn't get that when I was young. I only saw one black girl that was on a Disney show, that was known for being the sassy, coocoo, that type of girl.

I realized I'm a very, very white dancer.

When you look at "American Crime" and you have the character Terri LaCroix is a pharmaceutical executive - why does that character always have to be white?

You are the antithesis of a racist if you're white and you want to be black and you go out and do everything you can to identify as black, how in the world can they condemn that? That's not fraud. That's good intentions. And as we know, as we've learned, we are supposed to examine the good intentions and not the nature of the evidence.

Ray Charles, who said to Stevie Wonder, Maybe we're white. Never got a dinner!

Archie Bunker used to call me 'the laziest white kid he'd ever met.'

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

I have never felt the pain of not being white the way I've felt it since I've been a public figure/part of this entertainment industry.

"Native" always means people who belong someplace else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native.

As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.

Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.

He musta thought it was white boy day. It ain't white boy day, is it?

All the books that were being published by African-American guys were saying 'screw whitey', or some variation of that. Not the scholars but the pop books. And the other thing they said was, 'You have to confront the oppressor.' I understand that. But you don't have to look at the world through his eyes. I'm not a stereotype; I'm not somebody else's version of who I am. And so when people said at that time black is beautiful – yeah? Of course. Who said it wasn't? So I was trying to say, in The Bluest Eye, wait a minute. Guys. There was a time when black wasn't beautiful. And you hurt.