Maulana Karenga Quotes

Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.

People have to liberate themselves, because liberation is not a single act. It's a question of eternal vigilance. Otherwise, you'll just become enslaved by someone else.

The people have now come to realize that the only way to deal with the oppressor is to deal on our own terms and this was done.

I had some short struggle in my mind whether I should resign my lover or my liberty, but this lasted not long. I found myself as free as air and could not bear the thought of putting myself in any man's power for life only from a present capricious inclination.

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.

The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.

Of all the nations in the world, the people of the United States like freedom maybe a little better than anybody else.

Our main goal as Iraqi people is to drive the occupation out in any way.

We must learn to live the African way. It's the only way to live in freedom and with dignity

Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.

Out of the huts of history's shame I rise.

The suffering of our people is greater than our differences. We are not yet free at last, so there is work to be done.

The price of freedom is death.

There is only one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.

I will lead my people out of bondage, Lord.

It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

Resistance! Resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance!

No people to whom liberty is given can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant.

We have not forgotten the occupier. We remain a resistance.

In raising a people from slavery to freedom, you have called them to act on a new theatre; and it is a necessary part of your business, to teach them how to perform their parts.

Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal

We must never give a free hand to those who want to subjugate us, draw this line so that New York will never become New Mecca.

...the evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the Black people.

I love life and want to hold onto it. But my passion for justice for my tormented people, for their dignity and freedom, must be greater still. For of what value is a life of slavery, of humiliation and contempt for that which you hold most dear: Your identity! I will therefore not give in to the Turkish Inquisition.

Anytime anyone is enslaved or in any way deprived of his liberty, that person, as a human being, as far as I'm concerned he is justified to resort to whatever methods necessary to bring about his liberty again.