Dick Gregory

Truth is the baby of the world. It never gets old.

I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi.

Just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it.

We thought I was going to be a great athlete, and we were wrong, and I thought I was going to be a great entertainer, and that wasn't it either. I'm going to be an American Citizen. First class.

Fear and God do not occupy the same space.

I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.

It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn't stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.

One of the things I keep learning is that the secret of being happy is doing things for other people.

I went to Ethiopia, and it dawned on me that you can tell a starving, malnourished person because they've got a bloated belly and a bald head. And I realized that if you come through any American airport and see businessmen running through with bloated bellies and bald heads, that's malnutrition, too.

You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem? We're the only ones who know what it means to be Brand X.

I am really enjoying the new Martin Luther King Jr stamp - just think about all those white bigots, licking the backside of a black man.

America is 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 96 percent of the world's hard drugs.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' "I said: 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.