Dick Gregory Quotes

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

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.

The free man is the man with no fears.

Wouldn't it be a helluva joke if all this were really burnt cork and you people were being tolerant for nuthin'?

The jelly-bean eating thug says that national defense is important. But national defense starts at home.

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.

Race baiters and discriminators may go underground, but they never move out of town.

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

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.

When I first broke through, there was only NBC, CBS and ABC, and they had news in the morning and in the evening - there wasn't no 24-hour news.

Humans were the only creatures in the world that ate their food cooked. You'd never find a Gorilla frying up some bananas for dinner or a lion charcoal-broiling a zebra steak. Cats don't often run to the oven with a mouse or bird they've captured, and a dog wouldn't naturally prepare its rabbit dinner in a stew.

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

Black conservatives have a right to exist, but why would I want to walk around with a swastika on my shirt after the way Hitler done messed it up?

To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.

It's cool to be healthy.

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.

When I go through the airport and see white women walking through the airport barefooted, like athlete's feet don't exist, there's something wrong.

You know, I always say white is not a colour, white is an attitude, and if you haven't got trillions of dollars in the bank that you don't need, you can't be white.

When you look at Hitler and those thugs, you can put Walmart right next to them.

If you take 12 waters from the coconut - not the ones you buy in the store, although that's good - but the fresh coconuts, the little brown ones with the three eyes, if you take 12 of those within 24 hours, your blood will go back to the way it was when you were born.

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.

Everything we do we should look at in terms of millions of people who can't afford it.

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.

My belief is, you know, certain things have to be explained that's never been explained.

Love is very dangerous if you just have love and don't have the ability to be lovable.

Being white is a job in America. You take that away, you better get the soldiers out.

Every holiday on the calendar, I check in a hotel and fast - I don't eat, I don't drink, I don't talk.

I personally believe breathatarianism to be the highest mode of human living [ ... ] breathing in pure air, absorbing the direct light and energies of the sun, bathing in pure water [ ... ] I look at the obituaries every morning and ain't nobody listed but you eaters.

Now here's what I'm saying: I've always believed that every other month we hear about compromisation of bank records, I think that's the CIA and the FBI. Now let me tell you why I'm saying this. I don't believe no insignificant pip-squeak is going to be able to pull this off month after month and we can't find out what's going on.

In the United States, the Constitution is a health chart left by the Founding Fathers which shows whether or not the body politic is in good health. If the national body is found to be in poor health, the Founding Fathers also left a prescription for the restoration of health called the Declaration of Independence.

You got to die of something because if you die of nothing, they won't pay your insurance.

Eating liver out of a cow's body is like eating the filter out of a car.

I buy about $1,500 worth of papers every month. Not that I trust them. I'm looking for the crack in the fabric.

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

A friend of mine who works for naval intelligence said an aerial satellite revealed that 1.9 million attended the event in 1995. But if they would have had a rumble at the march the newspapers would have said that 75 million Afro-Americans were there.

No being should be killed. No being should be unloved.

My mother was the sweetest lady who ever lived on this planet, but if you tried to tell her that Jesus wasn't a Christian, she would stomp you to death.

I go to Chinese Christian community. Jesus looks Chinese.
I go to Japanese Christian community. Jesus looks Japanese.
I go to Brazilian Christian community. Jesus looks Brazilian.
How come in America Jesus looks white?

We have problems all over the world today, because men cease to be individuals. We like to identify with everything other than ourselves. We like to identify with groups, races, religions, you hear it every day. 'I'm Italian! I'm German! I'm Negro! I'm Jewish!' So what? Do you realize that when you identify with anything other than yourself, first as an individual, you have a cheap way out a lot of your own shortcomings?

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.

People keep telling me about the white race and the black race - and it really doesn't make sense. I played Miami, met a fellow two shades darker than me - and his name was Ginsberg! Took my place in two sit-in demonstrations - nobody knew the difference. The he tried for a third lunch counter and blew the whole bit ... asked for blintzes.

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.

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.

Because you make me laugh don't make you a comic. A comedian is a person who, that's how they make their living.

A Klaner (KKK) is a cat who gets out of bed in the middle of the night and takes his sheet with him.

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

The only good thing about the good old days is they're gone.

Fear and God do not occupy the same space.

People with high blood pressure, diabetes - those are conditions brought about by life style. If you change the life style, those conditions will leave.

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

Momma, a welfare cheater. A criminal who couldn't stand to se her kids go hungry, or grow up in slumbs and end up mugging people in dar corners. I guess the system didn't want her to get off relief, the way it kept sending social workers around to be sure Momma wasn't trying to make things better.

And we love to dance, especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede.

Revolution ain't nothing but an extent of evolution; Evolution is a fact of nature. So when old folks tell me that they don't understand hip hop and the music is too loud, well I guess it means you're not supposed to be in there.

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

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

Once we used to have to crank up our cars, now you can pop it on from inside your house. Everything has changed except how we get freedom.

There is a limit on how much information you can keep bottled up.

Life isn't a race. It's a relay.

Nature is not affected by finance. If someone offered you ten thousand dollars to let them touch your eyeball without 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.

Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

If all you can do is judge a person by their appearance, because you don't have the spirit to judge someone from within, you're in trouble.

The United States is the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet.

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

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

Pets are found to suffer from all the ailments known to the human ...

I feel that the same God-force that is the mother and father of the Pope is also the mother and father of the loneliest wino on the planet.

It was on Thanksgiving Day a number of years ago… I got to thinking that there might be some beings on another planet somewhere who are as intelligent compared with us as we are compared with turkeys.
Then I had visions of these beings from another planet going to the butcher shop with their meat list. I wonder what they'd call their butcher shops? They'd probably call them "folks shops." I could hear them placing an order: "Give me a half dozen Oriental knees, two Caucasian feet and twelve fresh Black lips." And the folks-shopkeeper comes back smiling and says, "These Black lips are so fresh they're still talkin'.

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.

In the South they don't mind how close I get, so long as I don't get too big. In the North they don't mind how big I get, so long as I don't get too close.

Makes you wonder. When I left St. Louis, I was making five dollars a night. Now I'm getting $5,000 a week - for saying the same things out loud I used to say under my breath.

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

Laughter is the best way to release tensions and fears.

I'm not a comic. I'm a humorist.

When I tune into my beautiful self, I get happiness.
Everything in the universe belongs to me.

When I was a boy, I was taught never to use insulting expressions like, 'I've been gypped,' or, 'He welshed on the deal.'

Coconut milk is the only thing on this planet that comes identically to mother's milk.

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.

If it wasn't for Abe Lincoln, I'd still be on the open market.

I believe young voters will either vote for Obama or not vote at all. So the problem is not Obama the problem is the system. If you think about how mess up this country is, most folk really don't have choices.

You hear entertainers all the time, saying, 'If I couldn't get paid for this, I'd do it for free.' When's the last time you ever heard a business person say, 'If I couldn't get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum, I'd do it for free'?

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

I tell people, 'If you want to send a message to the White House, call my house.'

I used to get letters saying, 'I didn't know black children and white children were the same.'