Dick Gregory Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that.

Dick Gregory
In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it's a sport.

Dick Gregory
If a man calls me a nigger, he is calling me something I am not. The nigger exists only in his own mind; therefore his mind is the nigger. I must feel sorry for such a man.

Dick Gregory
Poor is a state of mind you never grow out of, but being broke is just a temporary condition.

Dick Gregory
Those of us who weren't destroyed got stronger, got calluses on our souls. And now we're ready to change a system, a system where a white man can destroy a black man with a single word. Nigger.

Dick Gregory
I won't say I'm out of condition now - but I even puff going downstairs.

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

Dick Gregory
Love is man's natural endowment, but he doesn't know how to use it. He refuses to recognize the power of love because of his love of power.

Dick Gregory
Keep me a second-class citizen, but just don't make me pay first-class taxes.

Dick Gregory
Let me tell you about this daughter of mine.... She said, "I don't believe in Santa Claus." I said, "What in the world you mean you don't believe in Santa Claus?...Why?" She said, "Because you know darn good and well there ain't no white man coming into our neighborhood after midnight."

Dick Gregory
Nature is not affected by finance. If someone offered you ten thousand dollars to let them touch you on your eyeball without your blinking, you would never collect the money. At the very last moment, Nature would force you to blink your eye. Nature will protect her own.

Dick Gregory
Any clown knows that if you want to segregate somebody and keep them down forever, you put them up front. They made the great mistake of putting us in the back; we've been watching them for 300 years.

Dick Gregory
Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if ever you hear the word "nigger" again, remember they are advertising my book.

Dick Gregory
If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one.

Dick Gregory
Well, statistics prove that your far safer in a modern plane than in a bathtub.

Dick Gregory
No kid in the world, no woman in the world should ever raise a hand against a no-good daddy. That's already been taken care of: A Man Who Destroys His Own Home Shall Inherit the Wind.

Dick Gregory
Education means to bring out wisdom. Indoctrination means to push in knowledge.

Dick Gregory
Dogs are great assets to candidates, and the feeling seems to be engendered that if a dog loves the candidate, he can't be all that bad.

Dick Gregory
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.

Dick Gregory
Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the US on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.

Dick Gregory
Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It's the only way we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot.

Dick Gregory
Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten.

Dick Gregory
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.

Dick Gregory
You gotta say this for the white race—its self-confidence knows no bounds. Who else could go to a small island in the South Pacific where there's no poverty, no crime, no unemployment, no war and no worry—and call it a 'primitive society'?

Dick Gregory
Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant. 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, no way! Bring me a whole fried chicken."

Dick Gregory
In America, with all of its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun. But we don't know yet whether that sun is rising or setting for our country.

Dick Gregory
When you have a good mother and no father, God kind of sits in. It's not enough, but it helps.

Dick Gregory
Wouldn't it be a hell of a thing if all this was burnt cork and you people were being tolerant for nothing?

Dick Gregory
America is concerned more with the possibility of moon folks than the reality of hungry poor folks.

Dick Gregory