710 quotes found
"[On a live performance] If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball. So we want you to leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and swing."
"[S]o go on and play, and if you make a mistake, make it loud so you won't make it next time."
"If Art Blakey's old-fashioned, I'm white."
"Archie's been living off the fat of the land. I'm here to give him his pension plan. When you come to the fight don't block the door. 'Cause you'll all go home after round four."
"I think Terrell will catch hell at the sound of the bell. He's going around saying that he's a championship-fighter, but when he meets me he fall 20 pound lighter. He thinks that he's the real heavy weight champ but when he meets me, he'll just be a tramp Now I'm not sayin' just to be funny, but I'm fightin' Ernie because he needs the money."
"Ain't no reason for me to kill nobody in the ring, unless they deserve it."
"I never thought of losing, but now that it's happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life."
"I've got a lot of white associates. Elijah Muhammad, is the one who preached that the white man of America, number one, is the Devil. He's been preaching — he never mentioned England. England's people have never lynched us, raped us, castrated us, tarred and feathered us, burned us up, pulled our sockets apart, stick knives in pregnant women's stomachs, enslaved us, rob us of our names, our knowledge, our — Elijah Mohammad's been preaching that the white man of America – God taught him – is the blue-eyed, blond-headed Devil! No good in him, no justice, he's gonna be destroyed! His rule is over. He is the Devil!"
"This is the legend of Cassius Clay, The most beautiful fighter in the world today. He talks a great deal, and brags indeed-y, Of a muscular punch that's incredibly speedy. The fistic world was dull and weary, But with a champ like Liston, things had to be dreary. Then someone with color, someone with dash, Brought fight fans a-runnin' with cash. This brash young boxer is something to see. And the heavyweight championship is his destiny. This kid fights great. He's got speed and endurance. But if you sign to fight him, increase your insurance. This kid's got a left. This kid's got a right. If he hits you once, you're asleep for the night. And as you lie on the floor while the ref counts ten, you pray that you won't have to fight me again. For I am the man this poem is about, the next champ of the world, there isn't a doubt...."
"The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life."
"I hated every minute of it. But I said to myself, 'Suffer now, and live the rest of your life as a champion'."
"Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are."
"If Ali says a mosquito can pull a plow, don't ask how. Hitch him up."
"Religions all have different names, but they all contain the same truths. … I think the people of our religion should be tolerant and understand people believe different things."
"What's really hurting me, the name Islam is involved, and Muslim is involved and causing trouble and starting hate and violence. … Islam is not a killer religion. … Islam means peace, I couldn't just sit home and watch people label Muslims as the reason for this problem."
"I'm retiring because there are more pleasant things to do than beat up people."
"It's a lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believe in myself."
"It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up."
"I'm not the greatest; I'm the double greatest. Not only do I knock 'em out, I pick the round"
"Allah is the Greatest. I'm just the greatest boxer."
"I'd like for them to say he took a few cups of love, he took one tablespoon of patience, teaspoon of generosity, one pint of kindness. He took one quart of laughter, one pinch of concern, and then, he mix willingness with happiness, he added lots of faith, and he stired it up well, then he spreads it over his span of a lifetime, and he served it to each and every deserving person he met."
"Friendship is a priceless gift that cannot be bought nor sold, but its value is far greater than a mountain made of gold; for gold is cold & lifeless - it can neither see nor hear, in time of trouble its powerless to cheer — it has no ears to listen, no heart to understand, it cannot bring you comfort or reach out a helping hand. So when you ask God for a gift, be thankful if sends not diamonds, pearls or riches but the love of real true friends."
"I believe in Allah and in peace. I don't try to move into white neighborhoods. I don't want to marry a white woman. I was baptized when I was twelve, but I didn't know what I was doing. I'm not a Christian anymore. I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be...I'm free to be what I want."
"I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world... True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so called Islamic Jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion... We as Muslims have to stand up to those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda... They have alienated many from learning about Islam. True Muslims know or should know that it goes against our religion to try and force Islam on anybody."
"David Frost: What would you like people to think about you when you've gone? Muhammad Ali: I'd like for them to say: He took a few cups of love. He took one tablespoon of patience, One teaspoon of generosity, One pint of kindness. He took one quart of laughter, One pinch of concern. And then, he mixed willingness with happiness. He added lots of faith, And he stirred it up well. Then he spread it over a span of a lifetime, And he served it to each and every deserving person he met."
"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. For this fight, I’ve wrestled with alligators, I’ve tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning And throw thunder in jail. You know I’m bad. just last week, I murdered a rock, Injured a stone, Hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean, I make medicine sick. I’m so fast, man, I can run through a hurricane and don't get wet. When George Foreman meets me, He’ll pay his debt. I can drown the drink of water, and kill a dead tree. Wait till you see Muhammad Ali."
"If you were surprised when Nixon resigned, just watch what happens when I whup Foreman's behind!"
"You been hearing about how bad I am since you were a little kid with mess in your pants! Tonight, I'm gonna whip you till you cry like a baby."
"That's the only way you gonna save this sucker. He's doomed."
"I predict that when i meet Joe Frazier. This will be like a good amateur fighting a real professional. This will be like a kid out of the Olympics meeting the fastest heavyweight champion who ever lived."
"Joe Frazier is so ugly that when he cries, the tears turn around and go down the back of his head."
"Frazier is so ugly that he should donate his face to the US Bureau of Wildlife."
"All kinds of things set us back, but life goes on. You don’t shoot yourself. Soon this will be old news. People got lives to live, bills to pay, mouths to feed. Maybe a plane will go down with ninety people on it. Or a great man will be assassinated. That will be more important than Ali losing. I never wanted to lose, never thought I would, but the thing that matters is how you lose. I’m not crying. My friends should not cry."
"There live a great man named Joe who was belittled by a loudmouth foe. While his rival would taunt and tease Joe silently bore the stings. And then fought like gladiator in the ring."
"For every struggle that Joe survived, For every dispute he endured, to rise, Joe will go down in history as a model for champions to come. While Frazier was a man of few words, Ali was a world of mouth, but he found his place in history. Now his heart can express him well. Joe Frazier was a silent warrior, whom Ali silently admired. One could not rise without the other."
"Clay comes out to meet Liston and Liston starts to retreat, if Liston goes back an inch farther he'll end up in a ringside seat. Clay swings with his left, Clay swings with his right, Look at young Cassius carry the fight Liston keeps backing, but there's not enough room, It's a matter of time till Clay lowers the boom. Now Clay lands with a right, what a beautiful swing, And the punch raises the Bear clean out of the ring. Liston is still rising and the ref wears a frown, For he can't start counting till Sonny goes down. Now Liston is disappearing from view, the crowd is going frantic, But radar stations have picked him up, somewhere over the Atlantic. Who would have thought when they came to the fight? That they'd witness the launching of a human satellite. Yes the crowd did not dream, when they put up the money, That they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny."
"This I predict and I know the score, I'll be champ of the world in '64. When I say three, they'll go in the third, So don't bet against me, I'm a man of my word.... He is the greatest! Yes! I am the man this poem's about, I'll be champ of the world, there isn't a doubt. Here I predict Mr. Liston's dismemberment, I'll hit him so hard; he'll wonder where October and November went. When I say two, there's never a third, Bettin' against me is completely absurd. When Cassius says a mouse can outrun a horse, Don't ask how; put your money where your mouse is! I AM THE GREATEST!"
"I knew I had him in the first round. Almighty God was with me. I want everyone to bear witness, I am the greatest! I'm the greatest thing that ever lived. I don't have a mark on my face, and I upset Sonny Liston, and I just turned twenty-two years old. I must be the greatest. I showed the world. I talk to God everyday. I know the real God. I shook up the world, I'm the king of the world. You must listen to me. I am the greatest! I can't be beat!"
"My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. ... Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail."
"I'm not gonna help nobody get something my negroes don't have. If I'm gonna die, I'll die now right here fighting you, if I'm gonna die. You my enemy. My enemies are white people, not Viet Congs or Chinese or Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. You won't even stand up for me in America for my religious beliefs, and you want me to go somewhere and fight, but you won't even stand up for me here at home."
"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years."
"Over the years my religion has changed and my spirituality has evolved. Religion and spirituality are very different, but people often confuse the two. Some things cannot be taught, but they can be awakened in the heart. Spirituality is recognizing the divine light that is within us all. It doesn't belong to any particular religion; it belongs to everyone."
"We all have the same God, we just serve him differently. Rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, oceans all have different names, but they all contain water. So do religions have different names, and they all contain truth, expressed in different ways forms and times. It doesn't matter whether you're a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew. When you believe in God, you should believe that all people are part of one family. If you love God, you can't love only some of his children."
"My soul has grown over the years, and some of my views have changed. As long as I am alive, I will continue to try to understand more because the work of the heart is never done. All through my life I have been tested. My will has been tested, my courage has been tested, my strength has been tested. Now my patience and endurance are being tested. Every step of the way I believe that God has been with me. And, more than ever, I know that he is with me now. I have learned to live my life one step, one breath, and one moment at a time, but it was a long road. I set out on a journey of love, seeking truth, peace and understanding. l am still learning."
"Wouldn't it be a beautiful world if just 10 percent of the people who believe in the power of love would compete with one another to see who could do the most good for the most people? So many of us enjoy taking part in competitions, why not hold a competition of love instead of one that leads to jealousy and envy? If we continue to think and live as if we belong only to different cultures and different religions, with separate missions and goals, we will always be in self-defeating competition with each other."
"Once we realize we are all members of humanity, we will want to compete in the spirit of love. In a competition of love we would not be running against one another, but with one another. We would be trying to gain victory for all humanity. If I am a faster runner than you, you may feel bad seeing me pass you in the race, but if you know that we are both racing to make our world better, you will feel good knowing that we are racing toward a common goal, a mutual reward. In a competition of love we'll all share in the victory, no matter who comes first."
"To make America the greatest is my goal, So I beat the Russians, and I beat the Pole, and for the USA won the medal of gold. Italians said: "You're Greater than the Cassius of old´´. We like your name, we like your game, So make Rome your home if you will. I said I appreciate your kind hospitality, But the USA is my country still, 'Cause they're waiting to welcome me in Louisville."
"Since I won't let the critics seal my fate, they keep hollering I'm full of hate. But they don't really hurt me none, 'cause I'm doing good and having fun."
"How do you feel about Hitler sharing yours?"
"My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world."
"If my mind can conceive it; and my heart can believe it — then I can achieve it."
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing."
"When we marched on Montgomery, the Confederate flag was flying from the dome of the Capitol: this gesture can be interpreted as insurrection. But when Muhammad Ali decided to be true to his faith and refused to join the Army, the wrath of an entire Republic was visited on his head, he was stripped of his title, and was not allowed to work. In short, his countrymen decided to break him, and it is not their virtue that they failed. It is his virtue."
"The big fight is coming up – Ali and Frazier. I call him Muhammad Ali 'cause that's what he wants. Oh, yeah, he's a big dude and he hits hard, you know, I'll call him what he wants. But it's good that he's being allowed to work again, as you know he couldn't work for three years. Of course, he had a strange job, beating people up. But that was his right, he could have that job. The government wanted him to change jobs. The government wanted him to kill people. He thought it over and he said: "No, that's where I draw the line. Uh, I'll beat 'em up, but I don't wanna kill 'em." And the government told him: "Well, if you won't kill 'em, we won't let ya beat 'em up!""
"I hit him so hard that I made him cry. He looked at me and said, "I'm going to get you for that." I respected him then, and I respect him now."
"Clay showed me that I'll get locked up for murder if we're ever matched."
"Clay is a good enough fighter, but it's unfortunate that he's a Black Muslim. A champion should represent all sects, not one."
"The government has failed us; you can’t deny that. Anytime you live in the twentieth century, 1964, and you’re walking around here singing “We Shall Overcome,” the government has failed us. This is part of what’s wrong with you -- you do too much singing. Today it’s time to stop singing and start swinging. You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn’t help him to become the heavyweight champion of the world; swinging helped him become the heavyweight champion."
"I'd like to borrow his body for just forty-eight hours — there are three guys I'd like to beat up, and four women I'd like to make love to."
"Clay is so young and has been misled by the wrong people... He might as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan."
"The Black American struggle for civil rights gave us some of the most magnificent political fighters, thinkers, public speakers, and writers of our times. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, James Baldwin, and of course the marvelous, magical, mythical Muhammad Ali."
"Under the influence of Elijah Mohammad — who preached that blacks should refuse to integrate with "white devils" — Ali made a point of dating only black women and lashed out at men and women who engaged in interracial sex. In an interview with Playboy, he declared: "A black man should be killed if he's messing with a white woman." When the interviewer asked about black women crossing the colour barrier, Ali responded: "Then she dies. Kill her, too." It's unlikely that a white athlete who made such remarks would receive the praise that Michael Mann heaps on Ali. He says that the fighter "personified racial pride and self-knowledge". The Playboy journalist, who interviewed the boxer, was closer to the mark when he observed of his subject: "You're beginning to sound like a carbon copy of a white racist." … The transformation of Ali from a great fighter to a celebrated man of conscience and social purpose has succeeded so well because the actual history of his career has been altered to reflect the kinder, gentler man of today. Unpleasant remarks or facts from the past have been swept away or excused. … A more historically accurate appraisal of Ali would conclude that he was far from heroic outside the ring and was pitifully misused by his masters in the Nation of Islam. For his purposes, Elijah hijacked the impressionable young man's career and filled his head with racist nonsense. By the time he finally broke free of the old Nation of Islam, in the 1970s, his career was in its last stages. He continued to fight long past his prime, in part to recover the money and time he had lost in his misadventures with the Black Muslims."
"In the early 1970s Muhammad Ali fought for the heavyweight title against George Foreman. The fight was held in the African nation of Zaire; it was insensitively called the "rumble in the jungle." Ali won the fight, and upon returning to the United States, he was asked by a reporter, "Champ, what did you think of Africa?" Ali replied, "Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!" There is a characteristic mischievous pungency to Ali's remark, yet it also expresses a widely held sentiment. Ali recognizes that for all the horror of slavery, it was the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western freedom. The slaves were not better off—the boat Ali refers to brought the slaves through a horrific Middle Passage to a life of painful servitude—yet their descendants today, even if they won't admit it, are better off. Ali was honest enough to admit it."
"When I came to the stage on election night to give my acceptance speech[, a]fter thanking my supporters, I'd said this: "You know, it was back in '64 that a hero and an idol of mine beat Sonny Liston. He shocked the world. Well, now it's 1998 and the American dream lives on in Minnesota 'cause we SHOCKED THE WORLD!" Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, had been that hero and idol of mine growing up. I was at the impressionable age of twelve or thirteen, and naturally boxers are the epitome of toughness. Along came Muhammad, who broke the mold, reciting his poetry and predicting in what round he would win. Up until then, athletes were supposed to be modest people who were blessed by the Lord for having these wonderful physical bodies. Now here was this flashy, charismatic young black man proclaiming how pretty he was. Black men in America had never been pretty! [...] I had Clay's record album, I Am the Greatest! I'd memorized it. So I was ecstatic when Liston failed to come out for the eighth round. I always remembered Clay screaming, "We shocked the world!" after the fight, and that's all I could think of when I went out for my acceptance speech. Not long after this, I was in the transition office of the Capitol when on my schedule appeared the name Harvey Mackay. [...] Harvey came walking in with a big gift-wrapped box, and I was thinking, "What the heck could this be about?" Setting the box down, he said, "You'd better open that, governor." Inside was a pair of red Everlast boxing gloves and, written in magic marker on one of them was: "To Governor Jesse Ventura—You Shocked the World. Muhammad Ali." I was stunned. Harvey told me that Muhammad was watching TV the night I won. Harvey then set it up for us to go visit Muhammad on his farm in Berrien Springs, Michigan. [...] We spent a whole afternoon with Muhammad. It was a dream come true for me to be sitting on a couch with the Champ, creating a friendship. His wife, Lonnie, told me that he'd barely slept the night before, he was so excited I was coming. I was awestruck—Muhammad Ali, excited to see me? As the world knows, Muhammad suffers today from Parkinson's disease. So you do most of the talking, and he answers more with his eyes. We walked out to his gym and got in the ring together. [...] It was there that Harvey talked me into reciting "I Am the Greatest" from the record album. [...] I hadn't heard that album for thirty years, but I did the whole thing from memory. Muhammad was standing next to me and, when I finished, I could see a tear in his eye. Isn't it ironic that a white kid from south Minneapolis would have a black Muslim for a hero? Some people have said to me, "How can you, being a Vietnam veteran, look up to a guy like him who refused induction into military service?" My response is, "Because Muhammad is a man who gave up everything for his convictions. He was willing to sacrifice the greatest title in the world for his beliefs." You know damned well that Ali would never have seen Vietnam. He'd have done his boxing exhibitions on the military bases. But he wasn't going to play that game. I have tremendous respect for that. Something I noticed when I walked into his home: On a shelf in his living room, in equal prominence, are the Koran and the Bible. Obviously, they both carry a deep meaning for him. I imagine he reads both. For people who don't believe that Ali truly believes, they're wrong. Like I said, he's a man of conviction. Always has been, and always will be."
"I viewed Ali as the athletic equivalent of Dr. King. He had big love for his people. He had big courage. He thought beyond narrow nationalism and conventional views of patriotism. Mainly, he represented his own view of integrity. He did what he had to do. He spoke the unvarnished truth. When he said that no North Vietnamese had ever called him a nigger, that made sense. When he said he had nothing against the North Vietnamese people, that made even more sense. He had reached the pinnacle of celebrity in the paradigm of American sports, and then turned that paradigm on its head..."
"On 20 June 1967, boxing legend Muhammad Ali was convicted for refusing the draft for the Vietnam war in Houston, Texas. Ali had been a vocal opponent of the US war, saying: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” To try to quell the escalating resistance to the war, Ali was given the maximum sentence of five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. But their efforts were unsuccessful, and the anti-war movement continued to grow. Despite the Nation of Islam beginning to distance themselves from Ali, demonstrations supporting him took place around the world, from Egypt to Guyana to London to Ghana. Four years later his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court. Ali had no regrets: "I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free. And I made a stand all people, not just Black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just Black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war. Then, after the rich man’s son got out of college, he did other things to keep him out of the Army until he was too old to be drafted.""
"I'm just a dark guy from a den of iniquity. A dark shadowy figure from the bowels of iniquity. I wish I could be Mike who gets an endorsement deal. But you can't make a lie and a truth go together. This country wasn't built on moral fiber. This country was built on rape, slavery, murder, degradation and affiliation with crime."
"I’m too stigmatized in this country, I want to do something that will have a tangible effect on people. I live in a world where I’m not too media-friendly, I would never be successful in this country."
"Che Guevara is an incredible individual. He had so much, but sacrificed it all for the benefit of other people."
"Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time."
"Being a champion opens lots of doors—I'd like to get a real estate license, maybe sell insurance."
"Am I a born boxer? No—if I was, I'd be perfect."
"To a reporter in 2002: "It's interesting that you put me in the league with those illustrious fighters [Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Jack Johnson], but I've proved since my career I've surpassed them as far my popularity. I'm the biggest fighter in the history of the sport. If you don't believe it, check the cash register.""
"I still can’t believe [ Muhammad Ali ] knows my name. It astounds me he knows who I am. I first met Ali in 1976. I was locked up in a juvenile home and he came to visit. I’ve never forgotten it."
"Reported by Joyce Carol Oates in 1986 (published in 1987): "'It's a lonely sport,' Mike Tyson, who is surrounded by people who love him, says.""
"Everybody in boxing probably makes out well except for the fighter."
"In a 2005 post-fight interview Tyson described boxing as "the hurt business.""
"Every shot was thrown with bad intentions." This has often also been quoted as, "Every punch was thrown with bad intentions."
"1987: "I could have knocked him out in the third round but I wanted to do it slowly, so he would remember this night for a long time.""
"1988: "I just have this thing inside me that wants to eat and conquer. Maybe it's egotistical, but I have it in me. I don't want to be a tycoon. I just want to conquer people and their souls.""
"1990: "It's nothing personal, but I'm going to kill this guy.""
"2005: “I just don’t have the guts for it anymore. I don’t want to disgrace the sport. This is a great sport. It can take men from humble beginnings and have them rub shoulders with royalty.”"
"My career has been over since 1990."
"Then I came out of jail and beat guys because they were basically scared."
"I don't have the desire to hurt anyone anymore. I see a fly, but I don't have the nerve to get up and kill it."
"I don't have the stomach for this anymore. I don't have anything to fight for anymore."
"I just don't have the desire no more, I don't have the stomach to do it no more. I don't even kill insects in my house. I just don't kill anything no more. I used to kill pigeons, rip their heads off, 'You dirty rat pigeon!' I don't even have the heart to kill an animal no more. I just changed my whole life in general. That probably could have changed the way I fight."
"This is a weird feeling in my life I have to deal with, not being a violent man anymore when my whole life's reputation was built on being extremely violent. I just don't know how to deal with that right now. I don't even go to strip clubs no more. I don't know who I am sometimes, but I am not the guy I used to be. I'm not an angel or anything. I'm still lascivious, periodically. I'm just looking for some balance in my life."
"I don't know that person anymore, that guy in '86, '87. I don't know that guy no more. I don't have no affinity for that guy no more. I have no affinity for the guy who said, 'I am the greatest fighter God produced.' I have no affinity for the guy who said he would try to push his [opponent's] nose bone up into his brain. I just don't know that guy. I don't know who he is. I don't know where he came from. I don't have no kind of connection with him no more."
"After his final fight: "I felt like I was 120 years old. I feel like Rip Van Winkle right now.""
"On Muhammad Ali: "No man like him. There just isn't, everything that we have, he supersedes us, even our arrogance and our ego...I'd say from a boxing perspective, Ali is a fucking animal. He looks more like a model than a fighter, but what he is, he's like a tyrannosaurus rex with a pretty face. He's just mean and evil, and he'll take you to deep water and drown you. He's very special, the best in the world.""
"The spirit makes you a great fighter not drugs or anything ... the smartest fighter, the fighter that's more determined, the fighter that's dedicated, the fighter that wants it the most.. you have to have the desire to hurt him [to be the best fighter]."
"We’re really good friends, we go back to ’86, ’87. Most of my successful and best fights were at Trump’s hotels. He didn’t manage me, though. He was just helping me with my court case. We’re the same guy, a thrust for power, a drive for power. Whatever field we’re in, we need power in that field. That’s just who we are. Balls of energy. We’re not even who we think we are. We’re fire. We’re made of this crap—water, motion, dirt, diamonds, emeralds. We’re made out of that stuff, can you believe it?"
"That shit is the real deal. Listen: I’m a black motherfucker from the poorest town in the country. I’ve been through a lot in life. And I know him. When I see him, he shakes my hand and respects my family. None of them—Barack, whoever—nobody else does that. They’re gonna be who they are and disregard me, my family. So I’m voting for him. If I can get 20,000 people or more to vote for him, I’m gonna do it."
"I'm addicted to perfection. Problem with my life is I was always also addicted to chaos. Perfect chaos."
"I think I'm a pig. I have this uncanny ability to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'This is a pig. You are a fucking piece of shit.'"
"I can talk about humility, but I'm not humble. I mean, if you say, 'I'm humble,' you've just contradicted yourself. But I'm trying to be, man, I'm trying so hard."
"I put people in body bags when I'm right."
"I have the same malice in my heart as far as the fight game is concerned, but outside the ring, I won't say anything a dignified man won't say."
"One morning I woke up and found my favorite pigeon, Julius, had died I was devastated and was gonna use his crate as my stickball bat to honor him. I left the crate on my stoop and went in to get something and I returned to see the sanitation man put the crate into the crusher. I rushed him and caught him flush on the temple with a titanic right hand he was out cold, convulsing on the floor like an infantile retard."
"There's no one perfect. … Jimmy Swaggart is a lascivious creature, Mike Tyson is lascivious - but we're not criminally, at least I'm not, criminally lascivious. You know what I mean. I may like to fornicate more than other people - it's just who I am. I sacrifice so much of my life, can I at least get laid? I mean, I been robbed of my most of my money, can I at least get a blowjob without the people wanting to harass me and wanting to throw me in jail?"
"Don't be surprised if I behave like a savage. I am a savage."
"One minute I'm robbing a dope house. Next minute I'm the youngest heavyweight champion of the world. I'm only 20, 19, with a lot of money. Who am I? What am I? I don't even know who I am. I'm just a dumb child who's being abused and robbed by lawyers. I'm just a dumb pugnacious fool. I'm just a fool who thinks he's someone. Then you tell me I should be responsible."
"In a 1988 Sports Illustrated interview: "Real freedom is having nothing. I was freer when I didn't have a cent. Do you know what I do sometimes? Put on a ski mask and dress in old clothes, go out on the streets and beg for quarters.""
"I'm a good friend, but I'm a hell of an enemy. As your enemy, I want your demise. When I feel that in my heart it burns till I die."
"My whole life has been a waste - I've been a failure."
"One of my friends once saw another guy's (criminal) record and said, 'Look, this guy is a born troublemaker, just a loser.' I had to tell him, 'No, that's my record — and it doesn't include my juvenile history.'"
"They would give Jeffrey Dahmer a second chance before they gave me another one."
"I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts."
"My intentions were not to fascinate the world with my personality."
"In a 2004 interview with This Is London, Tyson announces that since declaring bankruptcy he has been sleeping in homeless shelters and living off handouts: "I've got nowhere to live. I've been crashing with friends, literally sleeping in shelters. Unsavoury characters are giving me money and I'm taking it. I need it. The drug dealers, they sympathise with me. They see me as some sort of pathetic character.""
"When I had money I was an animal. I was so belligerent. I lost all across the board."
"My life has been a total waste."
"I know I was a tough, bad-ass talking fighter, but I ain't no mob figure. I did my time for the rape. I paid my money to Las Vegas. I paid my dues. I ain't the same person I was when I bit that guy's ear off."
"I'll never be happy. I believe I'll die alone. I would want it that way. I've been a loner all my life with my secrets and my pain. I'm really lost, but I'm trying to find myself. I'm really a sad, pathetic case. My whole life has been a waste. I've been a failure. I just want to escape."
"I lost my soul as a human being. I lost my self-respect. I'm not a lovable guy, so it's really not hard for people to dislike me."
"I've been a prima-donna. I was taken care of since I was 13. That's why I am the way I am today. I was spoiled, like a brat. I had anything I wanted. That's crazy to be that way all your life. Everybody's taking care of you, but manipulating you at the same time. Very few people have a life like that. Most people have to work like slaves their whole lives. I've never had a job in my life. What I know how to do is hurt big, tough men — in the street and off."
"People say 'Poor guy.' That insults me. I despise sympathy. So I screwed up. I made some mistakes. 'Poor guy,' like I'm some victim. There's nothing poor about me."
"My life's not tragic at all. How many guys do you know who are bankrupt and just bought a $3 million house and are getting ready to get $6 million more?"
"I got a imam, I got a rabbi, I got a priest, I got a reverend — I got 'em all. But I don't want to be holier-than-thou. I want to help everybody and still get some (sex)."
"People are trying to force me to redeem (myself) — certain women, certain mentors. Nobody's going to change me. I'm going to fight that. You can't change me; you can't tame me. When you say that, I'm going to bite you even harder. I'm more ferocious, more complicated. I'm not going to let anybody win a popularity contest off my conduct. You have to understand. It is a pervasive (belief) that I'm an animal — undomesticated as well. But regardless of the bizarre (stuff) I've done, I'm a very rational individual. But everybody still thinks I'm crazy and stupid because that's what they want to believe."
"I’m just trying to change my life because I’m not above killing any drug dealer for money."
"From the London Times: "Tyson repeated his desire to do missionary work and said he had spoken to a Christian charity about aid work in Bosnia or Rwanda, 'somewhere where people are in dire need.'""
"It's such a shallow world I am involved with and I can't take it no more."
"I'm not too interested in these swan songs I'm continuing to hear. I'm just Mike. I'm a peasant. I'm here to entertain the people. I'm no elite person. At one stage in my life, I had my little jewelry and all my little girlfriends and my big cars and things. At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as I get older life is totally about losing everything. As life goes on, we lose more than we acquire. I don't want the finest girl in the world anymore. I'm just trying to stay balanced, basically."
"I don't do anything. My life sucks."
"I didn't know how to be any other way. I felt like one of those barbarian kings just coming to conquer the Roman Empire."
"Y'all guys can't define me or define my work as a father, i'm many things i'm many things you know, yeah i'm a convicted rapist, i'm a hell raiser, i'm a father, i'm a loving father, i'm, you know, a semi- good husband, you know what i mean? What? You know i'm just a man out here trying to enjoy my, you know I was born poor I ain't never had nothing I don't know how to act but the real thing is i'm just here to be me. I do'nt care about who anyone things at this stage in my life but yeah, i'm pretty much a tyrant titan. Yeahs thats who I am."
"I'm not eloquent or distinguished. You guys won't allow me to ever be that, so just bring it on."
"When you see me smash somebody's skull, you enjoy it."
"People love you when you're successful, but if you're not, who really cares about you?"
"There are nine million people who see me in the ring and hate my guts. Most of them are white. That's OK. Just spell my name right."
"To a question on whether he feels support from the common fan: "I don't feel love from them because there's no love. They don't know me as an individual; they know me for what I actually do. Because they pay to see me smash anybody. If they're white they pay, [it's] because the only thing they have respect for is my ability as an athlete. But if I was in court and I had to use them to testify against me on my character, they wouldn't testify positively against me and they would think I'm a cad...""
"In 2002: "I think the average person thinks I'm a fucking nut and I deserve whatever happens to me.""
"Do you want to talk to me? Or what do you want to do with me? Watch my eating techniques here? How I gorge the chicken? How I eat like a barracuda?"
"None of my friends have any respect for me. … No, most of these people thought of me like... some money... ."
"In 2005: "Most of my fans are too sensitive. I’m a cruel and cold and hard person. I’ve been abused in every way you can imagine. Save your tears. I lost my sensitivity. You embarrass me when you cry." ."
""I'm not used to sensitivity any more. When I see people cry when I lose, save your tears. I don't know how to handle people crying any more. I lost my sensitivity like that. Please, you embarrass me when you cry because I don't know what to do when you cry. I don't know what to say."
"My main objective is to be professional but to kill him."
"I'm the best ever. I'm the most brutal and vicious, and most ruthless champion there's ever been. There's no one can stop me. Lennox is a conqueror? No, I'm Alexander, he's no Alexander. I'm the best ever! There's never been anybody as ruthless! I'm Sonny Liston, I'm Jack Dempsey. There's no one like me. I'm from their cloth. There's no one that can match me. My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious. I want your heart! I want to eat his children! Praise be to Allah!"
"He was just splendid, a masterful boxer - I take my hat off to him"
"These books ain't window dressing. I think Machiavelli's the most sophisticated writer outside of Shakespeare. Way ahead of his time. Such a manipulative person. Everything he accomplished he did by kissin' ass."
"I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society."
"You guys have written so much bad stuff about me I can't remember the last time I fucked a decent woman. I have to go with strippers and 'ho's' and bitches because you put that image on me."
"I'm just like you. I enjoy the forbidden fruits in life, too. I think it's un-American not to go out with a woman, not to be with a beautiful woman, not to get my dick sucked … It's just what I said before, everybody in this country is a big fucking liar. [The media] tells people … that this person did this and this person did that and then we find out that were just human and we find out that Michael Jordan cheats on his wife just like everybody else and that we all cheat on our fucking wife in one way or another either emotionally, physically or sexually or one way."
"You guys would rather be with someone else who's equal to your status in life. Tiger Woods, or somebody. I comes across as crass, a Neanderthal, a babbling idiot sometimes. I like to show you that person. I like that person. He makes you want to come and listen to me."
"Most writers, in my opinion, are dysfunctional derelicts."
"Sometimes you guys have no pride, so no matter what I say, you guys … it doesn't affect you because you don't care about nothing but money. So every now and then I kick your fucking ass and stomp on you and put some kind of pain and inflict some of the pain on you because you deserve to feel the pain that I feel."
"I wish one of you guys had children so I could kick them in their fuckin' head or stomp on their testicles so you could feel my pain, because that's the pain I have waking up every day."
"I'm just a sucker even talking to you guys. I should be ready to rip your heads off your necks. But it's just not the right thing to do."
""Put your mother in a straight-jacket you punk ass white boy. Come here and tell me that, I'll fuck you in your ass you punk white boy. You faggot. You can't touch me, you're not man enough. I'll eat your asshole alive, you bitch. C'mon anybody in here can't fuck with this. This is the ultimate, man. Fuck you, you ho. Come and say it to my face.... I'll fuck you in the ass in front of everybody. You bitch.... come on, you bitch. You're scared coward, you're not man enough to fuck with me. You can't last two minutes in my world, bitch. Look at you scared now, you ho.... scared like a little white pussy. Scared of the real man. I'll fuck you 'til you love me, faggot!" [After being told by journalist/author Scoop Malinowski that he should be put in a straight-jacket]"
"I feel like sometimes that I was born, that I'm not meant for this society because everyone here is a fucking hypocrite. Everybody says they believe in God but they don't do God's work. Everybody counteracts what God is really about. If Jesus was here, do you think Jesus would show me any love? Do you think Jesus would love me? I'm a Muslim, but do you think Jesus would love me … I think Jesus would have a drink with me and discuss … why you acting like that? Now, he would be cool. He would talk to me. No Christian ever did that and said in the name of Jesus even … They'd throw me in jail and write bad articles about me and then go to church on Sunday and say Jesus is a wonderful man and he's coming back to save us. But they don't understand that when he comes back, that these crazy greedy capitalistic men are gonna kill him again."
"What I want in a woman is protection. Loyalty. Companionship. Loyalty, friendship, companionship, ferociousness. I want her to protect me, and have my back to the bitter end. If I have a fight, I want her to jump in. Even if I'm winning; even if she's ninety pounds. I like strong women—not necessarily a masculine woman—but I like strong women. I like strong, say a woman who runs a C.E.O. corporation. I like a strong woman with confidence—massive confidence—and then I want to dominate her sexually."
""It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading." Ebony September 1995."
"If they lock me up, at least I'll have a place to stay."
"You're smart too late and old too soon."
"He was trying to scrutinize with my brain."
"I have to dream and reach for the stars, and if I miss a star then I grab a handful of clouds."
"The act of treachery is an art, but the traitor himself is a piece of shit."
"On a 2002 column by sportswriter Wallace Matthews: “[He] called me a ‘rapist’ and a ‘recluse.’ I’m not a recluse.”"
"You can set a good example that you don't have to throw blows or be belligerent to get your point across."
"ESPN reporter: There were reports, Mike, that you were out partying in Vegas. Is that, in fact, the case? Tyson: This is not true. This is not true at all. Um, one day, I went out one day - because when somebody trains, you just get crazy and bored - and I went to a strip club because I gave a dancer a lap dance. Reporter: You gave HER a lap dance? Tyson: That's just what I like to do. I do what I want to do."
"On Don King: "I found out that someone I believed was my surrogate father, my brother, my blood figure turns out to be the true Uncle Tom, the true nigger, the true sellout. He did more bad to black fighters than any white promoter ever in the history of boxing.""
"On Sarah Palin: "Sarah Palin met the wombshifter! Old Sarah and the wombshifter.""
"On Floyd Mayweather: "Greatness is not guarding yourself from the people, Greatness is being accepted by the people.""
"On Social media: "Social Media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.""
"You disagree? Take the Tyson approach and bite me!"
"The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil foolish talk about his benefactor, Elijah Muhammad. Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death."
"Sit down and talk to Rev. Jackson [...] Sit down, Jewish leaders, and talk with us. We are ready to talk with you. Sit down and talk like intelligent people who have a future at stake."
"But if you harm this brother, [...] I warn you in the name of Allah, this will be the last one you harm. We are not making any idle threats. We have no weapons. We carry not so much as a penknife. But I do tell the world that Almighty God Allah is backing us up in what we say and what we do, and we warn you in His name, leave this servant of Almighty God alone."
"The Jews talk about "never again."… You cannot say "Never again" to God because when he puts you in the oven, you're in one indeed!… "Never again" don't mean a damn thing when God get ready for you!"
"Why should our people have to subsist on charity, or live in poor houses, when we built the country for you? Fought, bled, and died to maintain the country for you? You ask us to pay taxes like everybody else. Wait a minute! We don't get justice. We give you our tax dollar to support a police department that doesn't respect us. We give you our tax dollar to support education that does not educate us properly. We give you our tax dollars, you spend $4 billion each year on Israel, to maintain Israel in a welfare position. You send billions of dollars; you rebuild Germany; you rebuild Japan. Here we are; fought, bled, and died; made you what you are. What are you willing to come on down with to help the Black man rebuild himself?"
"When Jewish people remember the Holocaust, and want the world to remember the Holocaust… Why do you want the world to remember? Because if the world does not remember, it is likely to repeat itself. And Jewish persons who suffered from the Holocaust want the world to remember this, because the world turned its back while Jews were put in ovens. I, as a Black person, want my people to remember what we have suffered and what we continue to suffer so that we will say, like the Jews: Never again."
"I believe that for the small numbers of Jewish people in the United States, they exercise a tremendous amount of influence on the affairs of government ...Yes, they exercise extraordinary control, and black people will never be free in this country until they are free of that kind of control ..."
"It seems like being gay or whatever sin you wish to be a part of is okay ... but I have the duty to lift that gay person up to the standard to ask if they want to live the life that God wants them to or live the lifestyle that they want to live."
"The Jews have been so bad at politics they lost half their population in the Holocaust. They thought they could trust in Hitler, and they helped him get the Third Reich on the road."
"White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet."
"My time is up. I believe … that my time to be with my spiritual father and his sender has come. And your time to go through serious trial has come."
"Our lips are full of praise, but our hearts are far removed from the prophets we all claim. That's why the world is in the shape that it's in."
"Iran should not be denied the human right to knowledge...the fear of America is Iran's attitude to Israel, and the cornerstone of America's foreign policy is the protection of Israel... If Iran believes in Allah, and if Iran believes in the power of Allah, Iran can't be frightened by America."
"I know something of the good of Moammar Gadhafi that made me to love him as a brother and to feel a great sense of loss at his assassination, He died in honor, fighting for the Libya that he believed in."
"So Dr. King said it is a mockery to call it a law if it is unenforced, so to cut out Section 5 of the Voting Rights bill is to take out the enforcement to make sure the recalcitrant of some of those who never wanted us to vote in the first place would now be free to keep us going back and forth to court, litigating and litigating and litigating. Hell with litigation."
"I did not deprive any Jewish person of the right to worship God in the manner that they choose, but to bomb a church is the epitome of hatred and total disrespect, so that did not come from Louis Farrakhan."
"You cannot find one synagogue I desecrated. You cannot find one Jewish person I have harmed, except I refuse to be silent when I know the truth. And it was Jesus who said you shall know the truth and the truth will set us free."
"Death is sweeter than continued life under tyranny. ... Retaliation is a prescription from God. ... We must rise up and kill those who kill us. .. Let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling."
"What about Bernie Sanders? I have to say this about Mr. Sanders: He is a Jew. Not a so-called Jew. He's trying to be decent. But he can't do what he's saying. The Messenger [Elijah Muhammad] said you should beware of the national elections, because they come promising you everything to get your vote then you never hear from them again. And she [Hillary Clinton] is telling you, "We're gonna put 2 billion dollars…" 2 billion dollars? And you jumping up and down, "Oh! Look at Hillary, she's gonna give us some money!" She gonna give you death."
"The Jews have control over those agencies of government. When you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door."
"Satanic Jews have infected the whole world with poison and deceit."
"I'm not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite."
"I have not said one word of hate. I do not hate Jewish people. Not one that is with me has ever committed a crime against the Jewish people, black people, white people, no matter what your color is. As long as you don’t attack us, we don’t bother you."
"Through the darkness of the many hours of his life under the tyranny of apartheid and the wanton slaughter of Black people desirous of being free, he journeyed through the time of the rise of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC), and from the beauty of his heart he desired to see racial harmony exist in South Africa. So, in fostering the Truth and Reconciliation process, people Black and White and Indian spoke the truth of their deeds and why, and repented of the evil that all sides have done making it possible for Brother Nelson Mandela to come out of prison and become the first Black president of South Africa."
"Here, the Jews don't like Farrakhan, so they call him Hitler. Well, that's a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He wasn't great for me as a Black person, but he was a great German, and he rose Germany up from the ashes of her defeat by the united force of Europe and America after the first world war. Now, I'm not proud of Hitler's evils against the Jewish people. But that's a matter of record. He rose Germany up from nothing. Well, in a sense you could say there's a similarity in that we're rising our people up from nothing. But don't compare me with your wicked killers."
"We're goin' to make an example of Milton Colman! [...] What do [we] intend to do to Mr. Coleman? At this point, no physical harm . . . We're going to punish the traitor and make the traitor beg for forgiveness . . . One day soon we will punish you with death! . . . This is a fitting punishment for such dogs."
"The FBI, in preparation for this war, has stepped up its campaign against strong Black political leadership. The FBI is using dirty tactics under the guise of flushing out corrupt politicians to malign and besmirch the good name of many of our strong fighters for justice; threatening them with indictments or casting them into prisons. With other weaker leaders, the government has already promised them wealth and nearness to the centers of power and to be in their councils in exchange for their being silent when the attack finally comes."
"I am here to announce today that President Bush has met with his Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the direction of General Colin Powell, to plan a war against the Black people of America, the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, with particular emphasis on our Black youth, under the guise of a war against drug sellers, drug users, gangs and violence-all under the heading of extremely urgent national security."
"Now, it is well documented, through the Senate Subcommittee hearings on the Counterintelligence Program of the United States government, under J. Edgar Hoover, and through information that we have received under the Freedom of Information Act, that the Government of the United States, the Justice Department and the FBI, in the name of fighting communism; and in the name of preventing a "Messiah" from rising among Black people, who would unite us; and in the name of protecting the existing social and political order, used taxpayers' dollars to employ every dirty trick that was ever used in overthrowing foreign governments deemed to be enemies of the United States, to overthrow and to undermine all Black leaders and Black organizations in the United States."
"Now that I, and those with me, are working to rebuild the work of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as a means of reforming our people and transforming their lives into lives of service and usefulness to themselves and others, the same fear of the government that was seen in times past, is now seen again in the work of members of the FBI's anti-terrorist task force and the organized crime racketeering task force, that have been working night and day to cripple and destroy the Nation of Islam, culminating in an attack on Louis Farrakhan, with the purpose of discrediting, embarrassing and ultimately causing the death of Louis Farrakhan, preferably by heightening tensions within the movement exacerbated by government agents posing as Muslims. This is the aim of the United States government, and it appears to be the aim of the President of the United States President George Bush."
"Two weeks before George Bush was elected President, he made a speech before the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in Los Angeles, detailing his support of Israel and his continued support of the Jewish community. He pledged continued funding of the Justice Department in their continuing investigations and vigorous prosecution of those whom the President called, anti-Semites. And he said, "Whether they wear brown shirts, or white shirts and bow ties: whether they live in Skokie, Chicago, Illinois, or Brooklyn, New York, the villain is the same." I am sure President Bush was not referring to Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, who wears bow ties and white shirts. During the Reagan Administration, the then Vice-President Bush spoke out against me, identifying me by name. Now as he approached the Presidency he spoke of me by innuendo saying that he would continue the funding of the Justice Department, and he promised he would lead the fight against those whom he and certain leading members of the Jewish community determined to be "anti-Semites," through vigorous investigation, prosecution, and then, he indirectly referred to me as "the villain.""
"Evidence is now mounting that those were not empty words of the President, but those words, as in the past, have been translated into the final program and policy and war, that has been designed to destroy the Nation of Islam and Minister Farrakhan, with a particular focus on the growing strength of Black youth."
"For the past few years, the American press has been feeding the public the image of Black youth on a rampage. From the gangs called Crips and Bloods, in Los Angeles, California; the Central Park incident, to the drug sellers that are operating in the major cities along the East Coast, particularly in Washington, D.C., the image the American public gets is that when it comes to gangs, violence and drugs, that the gang leaders are Black; the violence is Black; the drug sellers are Black and the majority of drug users are Black. Our youth are being portrayed as the perpetrators of violence, and are being armed with "street sweepers," AK-47s, Uzis, MAC 10s. It is being reported that these Black youth are better armed than the local police."
"The police are saying that they have insufficient arms to combat these drug groups and, therefore, they either need heavier weapons, or the back-up of the National guard, and Federal troops. However, information has come to us that the police have great fire power available to them. And certain areas of the country have been targeted to test these new weapons. Armored personnel carriers that can travel at speeds up to 70 m.p.h. with high caliber machine guns are being stored in the armories of the major cities and the use of certain kinds of gases is being planned. This is being planned to be executed against Black youth in several major cities in the country, one of which is Washington, D.C."
"Well, first I think the council did a commendable thing because I believe that Dr. Alim {Abdul Muhammad} and the brothers and sisters who work with him in the Washington area have done a most commendable thing with drugs and the scourge of this city and this nation. It should be interesting to note that Minister Alim went into Mayfair Mansions and Paradise Manor, comprised of nearly 8 or 9 thousand people which you know were crime-ridden and drug-infested, and not with money, and not with guns but with a moral authority has literally almost completely ridden that community of drugs and it is almost completely crime-free."
"We are not rich people. We are poor people. But with the word that we have been taught by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, as espoused by Minister Alim, that miraculous result was brought about and so the city council should be commended for recognizing that effort."
"Now to speak to the charge of antisemitism. To say that Louis Farrakhan is an antisemitic is an improper and unjust characterization of me. To say that I have been critical of Jews and critical of the state of Israel is true. But I have been critical of blacks, critical of our leaders, critical of Arabs, critical of whites, and yet my own people don't call me anti-black and Arabs don't call me antisemitic and they are also semitic people. The term is wrong. And is wrongfully applied. My criticism of Jews should be taken in that light. And criticism, sir, with all due respect, is not necessarily born out of dislike of the person, but dislike of the condition that maybe these persons are involved with..."
"Certainly I said some Jews were responsible on the ships that brought our fathers into slavery. All Jews didn't own those ships. Some Jews have been responsible for characterizing black people as clowns and buffoons using the movie industry to get that message over..."
"I have no reference whatsoever to the religion that Jews practice. Listen to me carefully, please. I said this morning that I was referring to the actions of the state of Israel using God and religion as a cover for what I said was lying, stealing, murder, using God's name as a shield for your dirty religion, meaning you're preaching one thing, but you are practicing another. And when I said I have no reference to Moses and what Moses revealed, there is nothing in any way, shape or form in any of my speeches that you have ever heard me say that I condemn Moses and what Moses taught to the Jews, or condemned Jesus and what Jesus taught to the Jews, or condemned Muhammad and what Muhammad taught to the Arabs. But I do condemn our actions in direct contravention to what we profess we believe as taught by the prophets. And I said in that paper that Jews, some of them practice dirty religion; some Muslims practice dirty religion; some Christians practice dirty religion, and that's why we're in America in the condition that we're in under religious people who went in direct contravention to the teaching of their prophet. That's my statement. I never ever mention Judaism in that context, nor will I ever."
"There are righteous Jews, and there are righteous Christians, and there are righteous Muslims; and there are unrighteous Jews and unrighteous Christians and unrighteous Muslims. There are righteous blacks and there are unrighteous blacks, and now if we're going to get into lumping everyone together, then I think we would be guilty of making an error."
"I couldn't honestly say that. But, you know, it's like a knee-jerk reaction, because when {there's} a person like myself, and, you know, as a white person or as a Jewish person you're not used to hearing any black person criticizing Jewish behavior, not publicly. I could be wrong. But I don't recall any black person ever being lambasted like Louis Farrakhan {has been lambasted} as a bigot and {an} antisemite."
"I feel that there is a certain sensitivity -- that Jewish rabbis and I have sat down and talked about -- that Jews have, and that we have as a persecuted and an oppressed people. And maybe in that sensitivity there has been a reaction to statements made by Louis Farrakhan as we react to anything that opens a sore with us like the {CBS-TV commentator Andy} Rooney thing recently and the other fellow on CBS, Jimmy the Greek. We're very sensitive and Jews are very sensitive. And in that sensitivity, I think care has to be taken by us. And sometimes when you say something and people say, "Ouch!" and you learn that you have offended, then you're conscious of being careful."
"For those who are students of history, we are very suspicious to be very honest with you, because we know the history. We know that in this country to decimate the population of the Indians, blankets were sent to the Indians containing smallpox. We know that in this country {there was} the Tuskegee experiment, where a hundred black men were given the most virulent form of syphilis and a program was set up that they would never be treated for syphilis and these men cohabited with many, many women, spreading syphilis among our people. This is documented. We do know that in New Zealand, in Australia, in the Congo -- wherever whites have wanted that particular area -- there has been a genocidal plot against the lives of those native people, and it goes on to this day. And we respectfully submit that we are deeply concerned because we have a population of between 30-40 million people much of whom are useless to this society. And we watch how this society treats the elderly who have served this country well, and we watch how this society treats those who have outlived their usefulness."
"And we are afraid when we see a population ever growing, millions of unemployed, millions of unemployable and angry youth. And we see drugs flooding into our community and you know we don't produce the drugs, we don't bring them in. You know, sir, that because of the deep economic condition in the black community, you can't offer young blacks a job at Wendy's or McDonald's as an alternative to selling crack. And if Mr. Bush can see the wisdom in providing some economic solutions to the growers of the cocoa leaf in Peru and Bolivia, then surely Mr. Bush should see there has to be an economic solution to drugs in America and particularly in the black community. So I am saying we are dying. Blacks are dying in America at an inordinate rate. Is there a plan? We believe there is."
"America, since the 1954 Supreme Court decision and since the civil rights acts of 1964 and '65, has created a larger black middle class sort of as a buffer between the white community and the black community. And this middle class that has been created as a result of the struggle of the poor, the youth that were out on the marches with Dr. King, the youth that were rioting, the youth that were throwing the Molotov cocktails, the youth that got shot down in the streets -- it was their effort that caused you {black journalists} to be here. You weren't here before then, I don't think. It's the suffering, the poor black people that opened the door for us sitting around the table."
"We built your country and this civilization has turned us so backward mentally that you let us go under the Emancipation Proclamation, passed the 13th Amendment against involuntary slavery knowing that {because of} the mental condition that our people were in, we would become your volunteer servants. And so we have served America, fought in all her wars, bled and died on every field of battle. We helped you beat Germany, and now Germany is reunited and we can't get together. The walls are tumbling down between Eastern Europeans, but no walls are tumbling down with us because there are those who don't want to see us reconcile our differences."
"Since the prisons are full and you really don't rehabilitate prisoners, you loved Malcolm X, so you say. Well, look at Malcolm. He was a thief, a hustler, a pimp, a user of drugs, a seller of drugs, a bank robber. Would you love him in that condition? Would you accept a picture of him on your wall in that condition? But who reclaimed him? We did. And the brilliance of that man is the same brilliance that's hiding in prisons all over America. Malcolm was not the exception. Malcolm is the rule. There are many brilliant black people. All they need is a chance."
"Gentiles and Jews worked together with the aid of America, England, France, the United Nations and set up the state of Israel, took land from the Palestinians, but you created a state for Israel and you created hope for Jews. All Jews are not there, but all Jews know that they have the right to go there."
"And I'll close by saying, you know Mr. Bush, the president, I think a week before he was elected, was standing before the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and he pledged his support to Israel. And then he turned around and said that he pledged continued support, funding the Justice Department in their vigorous investigation and prosecution of antisemites whether they wear brown shirts, white shirts and bow ties, whether they live in Skokie, Chicago or Brooklyn, the villain is the same. I don't think they were talking about Sen. {Paul} Simon {D-Ill.}, who wears white shirts and bow ties. That to me says that this president has in his heart for me what Reagan had in his heart for {Libyan leader Moammar} Gadhafi. And I'm saying that's a mistake. Through The Washington Post, I'd like to say to Mr. Bush, that would be unwise. And it is unwise because you, Mr. Bush, are in the position of a modern pharaoh and Pharaoh lost his army, his government and his power over his rejection of an honorable and just solution to the problem posed by the unwanted presence of the Israelite slaves. And so it is today."
"I believe that there is {a} continuing investigation and I believe that Mr. Bush and those who fear the rise of black people see me as much today a threat as they saw my brother, Martin Luther King, when he made that speech, a really innocuous speech in Washington in 1963 where he hoped that black and white and Jew and gentile, Protestant and Catholic would get together. The next day, J. Edgar Hoover received from his staff people a memo saying that Martin Luther King Jr. was the most dangerous Negro in America and then this government through the Justice Department investigated Dr. King vigorously, and I doubt that the government can escape culpability in that man's assassination or in the assassination of Malcolm X. And I firmly believe that they have something similar in store for me."
"We thank all of the Black newspapers, radio stations, commentators, disc jockeys who really talked up the Million Man March. The mass media did not get involved until the last minute and it seemed as though they got involved with another agenda in mind. But to all of you, and we thank you the mass media too, because even though you planned it for mischief, God planned it for good."
"We’re standing at the steps of the United States Capitol. I’m looking at the Washington Monument and beyond it to the Lincoln Memorial. And, beyond that, to the left, to your right, the Jefferson Memorial. Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of these United States and he was the man who allegedly freed us. Abraham Lincoln saw in his day, what President Clinton sees in this day. He saw the great divide between Black and White. Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton see what the Kerner Commission saw 30 years ago when they said that this nation was moving toward two Americas–one Black, one White, separate and unequal. And the Kerner Commission revisited their findings 25 years later and saw that America was worse today than it was in the time of Martin Luther King, Jr. There’s still two Americas, one Black, one White, separate and unequal."
"Abraham Lincoln, when he saw this great divide, he pondered a solution of separation. Abraham Lincoln said he never was in favor of our being jurors or having equal status with the Whites of this nation. Abraham Lincoln said that if there were to be a superior or inferior, he would rather the superior position be assigned to the White race."
"Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, and 16 and 3 make 19 again. What is so deep about this number 19? Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today? That number 19! When you have a nine, you have a womb that is pregnant. And when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there’s something secret that has to be unfolded."
"Right here on this mall where we are standing, according to books written on Washington, D.C., slaves used to be brought right here on this mall in chains to be sold up and down the eastern seaboard. Right along this mall, going over to the White House, our fathers were sold into slavery. But, George Washington, the first president of the United States, said he feared that before too many years passed over his head, this slave would prove to become a most troublesome species of property. Thomas Jefferson said he trembled for this country when he reflected that God was just and that His justice could not sleep forever. Well, the day that these presidents feared has now come to pass, for on this mall, here we stand in the capital of America, and the layout of this great city, laid out by a Black man, Benjamin Banneker. This is all placed and based in a secret Masonic ritual. And at the core of the secret of that ritual is the Black man. Not far from here is the White House."
"You came not at the call of Louis Farrakhan, but you have gathered here at the call of God. For it is only the call of Almighty God, no matter through whom that call came, that could generate this kind of outpouring. God called us here to this place, at this time, for a very specific reason. And now, I want to say, my brothers, this is a very pregnant moment, pregnant with the possibility of tremendous change in our status in America and in the world. Although the call was made through me, many have tried to distance the beauty of this idea from the person through whom the idea and the call was made."
"We are standing on the sacrifice of the lives of those heroes, our great men and women that we today may accept the responsibility that life imposes upon each traveler who comes this way. We must accept the responsibility that God has put upon us, not only to be good husbands and fathers and builders of our community, but God is now calling upon the despised and the rejected to become the cornerstone and the builders of a new world."
"Oh, but you better look again, Willie. There’s a new Black man in America today. A new Black woman in America today. Now brothers, there’s a social benefit of our gathering here today. And that is, that from this day forward, we can never again see ourselves through the narrow eyes of the limitation of the boundaries of our own fraternal, civic, political, religious, street organization or professional organization. We are forced by the magnitude of what we see here today, that whenever you return to your cities and you see a Black man, a Black woman, don’t ask him what is your social, political or religious affiliation, or what is your status? Know that he is your brother. And if he needs help, you are obligated to help your brother because he is your brother."
"You must live beyond the narrow restrictions of the divisions that have been imposed upon us. Well, some of us are here because it’s history making. Some of us are here because it’s a march through which we can express anger and rage with America for what she has and is doing to us. So, we’re here for many reasons but the basic reason that this was called was for atonement and reconciliation. So, it is necessary for me in as short of time as possible to give as full an explanation of atonement as possible."
"Now, Martin Luther King, Jr. was probably one of the most patriotic Americans. More patriotic than George Washington. More patriotic than Thomas Jefferson. More patriotic than many of the presidents because he had the courage to point out what was wrong in the society. And because he pointed out what was wrong, he was evil spoken of, vilified, maligned, hated and eventually, murdered. Brother Malcolm had that same road to travel. He pointed out what was wrong in the society and he had to suffer for pointing out what was wrong and he ultimately died on the altar for pointing out what was wrong. Inside the nation, outside the nation, to the greater nation and to the smaller nation."
"For every deed has a consequence. And we can never be granted protection against the faults that we refuse to acknowledge or that we are unwilling to confess. So, look. Who should you confess to? I don’t want to confess. Who should you confess to? Who should I confess to? Who should we confess to? First, you confess to God. And everyone of us that are here today, that knows that we have done wrong, we have to go to God and speak to Him in the privacy of our rooms and confess. He already knows, but when you confess, you’re relieving your soul of the burden that it bears."
"Now, look brothers, sisters. Some people don’t mind confessing. Some people don’t mind making some slight repentance. But, when it comes to doing something about the evil that we’ve done, we fall short. But atonement means satisfaction or reparation for a wrong or injury. It means to make amends. It means penance, expiation, compensation and recompense made or done for an injury or wrong. So, atonement means we must be willing to do something in expiation of our sins so we can’t just have a good time today, and say we made history in Washington. We got to resolve today that we’re going back home to do something about what’s going on in our lives and in our families and in our communities."
"I must hasten to tell you, Mr. President, that I’m not a malicious person, and I’m not filled with malice. But, I must tell you that I come in the tradition of the doctor who has to point out, with truth, what’s wrong. And the pain is that power has made America arrogant. Power and wealth has made America spiritually blind and the power and the arrogance of America makes you refuse to hear a child of your slaves pointing out the wrong in your society."
"Inside of one month, we would have over $100 million. And in one year, we would have $1.2 billion. What will we do with that? I would love for the leadership up here to form a board and call in Myrlie Evers Williams and ask her, what is the budget of the NAACP for this year? It’s $13 million. It’s $15 million, write a check. Now, next year you have to become accountable to the board, and the members of the NAACP will be on the board too, which means that no Black organization will be accountable to anybody outside of us. But accountable to us and we will free the NAACP, the Urban League and all Black organizations to work in the best interest of our people. How many of you would like to see all our Black organizations free? Now, look brothers, an economic development fund for $10 a month is not a big price to ask to begin to build an economic infrastructure to nurture businesses within the Black community. Soon the leadership is going to meet and work out the details of an Exodus, Exodus Economic Fund."
"Oh, before we say that prayer, the brother of my leader and teacher, the honorable Elijah Muhammad, is here with me and with us. He’s like my father in the absence of my father. He knows this history of the Nation of Islam better than any man in America and I thank God that he lived long enough to see the day that he suffered and worked for, for now 65 years. The brother of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, brother John Muhammad."
"Women are beautiful and the female body is attractive, but a real man cannot think sane thoughts with the female form on his mind. Girls look at television, watching beautiful Beyonce with her beautiful body, but her moves are so provocative. The child does not know anything about sex, but sees that adults approve of those provocative dances, and begins to imitate Beyonce. As young as four and three, girls are learning to shake their bodies in vulgar dances, yet no one seems to be speaking to this as the destruction of potential virtue."
"Some men have become so sick that they try to push themselves in a sexual way into a baby, splitting them. Fathers are sexually abusing their daughters, along with uncles, brothers, cousins and even aunts; and now the lesbian craze is in. We are so undervalued because of our ignorance and lack of the potential for honor and respect."
"So some women tell themselves they do not need a man for anything. It is not that our women want to be lesbians, but another woman understands the pain that another woman is going through or being put through in her interaction with men. When they get tired of the game playing, they fall on each other and find more comfort in another woman than they find in a man. But I do not care if you call yourself a lesbian, when a real man comes along, a real man will awaken that spark in you because you are a real woman—a beautiful woman, but a very abused woman."
"If a virtuous woman is more precious than silver and gold and you wake up in a place where there are 70 virtuous girls who have never been touched by a man, where did you wake up? You do not have to physically die to see that paradise, but you have to die as a n----r. You have to die as the creature that the White man made. When you wake up from that death, you will want to see virtuous women, because the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said, "Where there are no decent women, there are no decent men, for the Black woman is the mother of civilization.""
"We are a sick people and there is no way we can expect White people to show respect to us and submit to our desires when we are so fractured and broken as a people. But no one wants to address the real problem: respect for authority. Who is the Supreme Authority of this creation? It is our Creator. Does the Creator have a right to expect from us respect, honor and obedience?"
"Many of us drive automobiles, which came with an owner’s manual in the glove compartment when we bought it. If we really want to get the best out of our vehicles, we have to follow certain guiding principles in the owner’s manual from the maker. Some of us use beauty products, which have instruction on the bottle. If we fail to pay attention to the instructions, we may lose our hair."
"So since the Creator is the author of our existence, should not He have the right to give us instructions and should not we respect His right to guide us in how to use the life that He so beautifully and wonderfully gave to us? The Bible and Holy Qur’an both contain instructions on how to use the life that Allah (God) has given. Scriptures are not romantic stories of foolishness; they offer many wonderful guiding principles. In our ignorance, we defile our bodies, but there is a consequence for rebellion against God, Who is the highest line of authority."
"When men have an outside interest in another female, and they have made a vow to their wives; and because there are so many women with so few men, men feel that they can play with women, who do not respect marriage. In the Islamic world, adultery is punished by death penalty. Allah (God) gave Moses a law that the fornicator and adulterer should be stoned to death, because marriage is the cornerstone of family. Family is the cornerstone of nation and anything that will interfere, corrupt or destroy marriage and family is ultimately a disease that will undermine and sink that nation."
"Your wife may believe your lies about your whereabouts at first, but eventually you cannot fool your wife when another woman interferes in her house. She knows something is wrong; your touch does not feel the same. When she confronts you with actual facts, you become a master liar and manipulator. You put on a macho front and threaten her. But either you are going to come clean or you undermine yourself by lying."
"She argues with you because she is hurting. She feels betrayed. She does not mind calling you out of your name. Your children are listening. When the fight is over, the children talk to each other about what you called each other. If the father smacks the mother, the children tend not to take their father’s side. The woman brought them into the world. They are on her side because nature tells them to be on her side. Babies will throw their bottles at their fathers for hitting their mothers."
"While it is natural for a man to be attracted to the beauty of a woman, Brothers, we must restrain ourselves to protect our marriages and families. The face of the enticing beauty of women is a great test, which most of us fail. Men believe there is free pleasure, but there is no free woman. Every woman costs money and it costs money to play. To play with your wife, family and the future of that family is self-destructive and almost suicidal behavior."
"The Muslim world is a caricature of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). A caricature is the gross enlargement of characteristics for the purpose of mockery or fun. Do you think the Prophet would be happy to see Shiite and Sunni Muslims slaughtering each other in Iraq? That is a caricature. The Muslim world is corrupted with conduct that the Prophet taught against: kings and rulers bringing in women and liquor from Europe, getting drunk in their palaces, coming to America and spending millions of dollars in gambling places and on prostitutes. This conduct is a caricature of the Prophet. We have to come back in our own house and end our caricature of Islam."
"Many of you look so beautiful in your uniforms and regalia for coming to the mosque. But as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said during one lecture when our Muslim Brothers from the East were sitting on the rostrum, they are not here to see that you are clothed in a long, white dress or a long, black dress; they are here to see if you are clothed in the principles of your religion."
"We have fallen a long way and it is time to recognize that. The outside world already recognizes it. They already know. They are waiting for us to catch up to what we have shown them. There was a time when you could not go in any ward where Black people live and you could not find a Muslim with the Muhammad Speaks. There was a time when Black women, even though they never came to a mosque, felt safe when they saw a Muslim because they knew we would protect them. There was a time when gang violence would never rear its ugly head because the F.O.I. was strong. But today, when the light goes out in the house, there is nothing for the people to hold onto. So should the show go on? Should the masquerade ball continue? Or should we say that the masquerade is over and let’s go home and recommit our lives to Allah (God) and the righteous principles that we know we have been taught; recommit our lives to our spouses and children."
"So we may be divine, and we are, but we have acted differently. It’s not our fault—it really is God’s doing. “You mean our savage behavior is God’s doing?” What kind of God would permit evil on our planet, and subject humanity to evil where we have become reflections of rebellion to God? “Did You do that, God?” May I answer? I will answer from God Himself, His words from the Holy Qur’an (Surah 2, verse 30). God was with the angels, according to The Qur’an, and He made a declaration. He said: “I am going to place a ruler in the earth.” And the angels said, “But what will You place in it other than that which will create mischief and cause the shedding of blood?” Allah knew the angels extolled His holiness and His righteousness, but He answered tersely, but truthfully: “I know what you know not.”"
"So evil was allowed a period to rule, and a people were made to fulfill that which God permitted. We can say with knowledge that the rulers of this world, who happen to be Caucasian, have not been good. We are proof of that. And their history proves that they have not been good, not only to Black, Brown, Red and Yellow, but they have not been good to themselves and their own people. Nevertheless, the last message of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in 1974, February the 26th, he said: “Who is responsible: The Potter or The Clay?” (Saviour’s Day address “When The Sun Rises in The West”). He said, “The White man could easily say, and rightly so, ‘I did not make myself.’ ” So you geneticists, and students of biology, you know that “white” is an absence of color that came from color. So if he is not the “original man,” and he is not; and he is not the “aboriginal,” and he is not. … He is not “man” as such, he is mankind: A kind of a man, made in the image and likeness of the Original Man."
"We had an infinity of time: The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that God taught him over 78 trillion years of time on our planet—not his (the White Man.) Our planet, in Our universe—we are the makers of all that you see of creation. And when a son would be born to end the rule of the enemy of God, his (the enemy’s) job would have been made complete. Now, you can be angry with White people if you want to, and you could curse them out and say ugly things, because they have done ugly things. But wait a minute: They couldn’t have done any of this if Allah (God) didn’t permit it. He (the White Man) justifies his existence as a “devil” by being himself."
"Now, I’m asking you to reason with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad; I want us to look at what Elijah Muhammad put on the back page of our newspaper, The Final Call. He introduced The Muslim Program during a lecture delivered in July 1962 at the Arie Crown Theater in the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois; then in the next year it was on the back page of the Muhammad Speaks newspaper. And from that day to this, we have kept his Program before the world (“What The Muslims Want” and “What The Muslims Believe”)."
"Now, (as we have seen during football games): Is that flag horizontal? That’s disrespect of the American flag. And when my brother takes a knee, and his brothers join him, the president of the United States calls us “sons of bitches.” Now, when I was young, say something about mom: those are fighting words, brother. And to add insult to injury, the National Football League, and the Department of Defense have been paid millions of dollars to display the flag in that way, and play the national anthem. It leads to people joining the armed forces. It doesn’t have anything to do with “patriotism,” they get millions of dollars from the Department of Defense for displaying the flag in a disrespectful manner. It’s about money. It’s about recruiting. It’s about using the patriotic zeal of the people."
"Mr. Trump has changed the narrative. Black people don’t hate the flag, as such; they don’t hate America as such, but they just wanted to draw attention to what we are suffering under the flag. And the police that shot us down, they have a flag somewhere on their uniform. When we go to court, the flag is there—and we can’t get justice. My son’s father-in-law fought in World War II, and he saw his buddies shot down, blown to pieces, on Normandy Beach. So every time he sees the flag, he stands, puts his hand over his heart; not so much for the flag, but for the noble men and women who have died for that flag. But Mr. Trump: When did your father get here from Germany? And you so-called “patriots,” see, when you all came here from Europe, you had a country to come home to. The Statue of Liberty welcomed you: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” It never was a golden door for us. The first man to die in the Revolutionary War that gave America a nation was a Black man. Black folk died in the War of 1812; Black folk died in the Civil War on both sides, North and South. Black brothers have died in World War I, World War II, Korean Conflict, Vietnam, and the army is full of them now."
"Mr. Trump, no wonder the general is a little kind of “p.o.’d” at you; because these same Black men whose mother you referred to in such a negative way for producing giants in the world of sport and play, you’re going to be calling on them to fight the war that you’re building up to now."
"They say if you want to hide something from a Black man, put it in a book. And if you want to hide the Birth of a Saviour for the Black man, hide Him in the ghetto."
"There is nothing that I have done, nothing that I have been blessed to say—all the wonderful things that I have been guided to do up to this very moment came from the mind of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He told me that he wanted my mind. He wanted me to line my mind up with his mind so that it would be one mind. I did not know how that could be accomplished. One day I was talking with my friend and confidant, Brother Jabril Muhammad, and I told him what The Messenger had said, and I said, “Gee, how … do I get his mind?” He said, “Oh, brother, that’s easy!” He said, “He has to bring you in the same path that God brought him, and you will walk right up into his mind.” To my Christian family, the scripture teaches, “Let this mind be in you the same that was in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5) Here, God is offering to the people of His choice the greatest gift of all, because their suffering, under served, has made them heirs to the greatest gift of all, The Mind of God Himself through Jesus."
"I have been in front of you for a lifetime. I have been in front of you for the last 40 years in the absence of my teacher. If you really want to know how good a student is, just leave the classroom: Children don’t mind monitors; they say, “That’s the teacher’s pet.” He left me with you."
"If I did not love God with all my heart, my soul, my strength, I could not have withstood what you put on me. If I did not love God and The Mission of the resurrection of Black people in America and all over the world, White people would have destroyed me a long, long, long time ago—But Here I Stand! With His power, He raised me. I am not a Negro! I am not a colored boy! I am a young God, growing up in The Classroom of God! My brother Malcolm stayed in The Class for 12 years and shook the world. My brother Muhammad Ali stayed in The Class for about 10 years and shook the world. It’s real easy to follow a man in the cool of the evening, but how many can follow him in the heat of the day?"
"I don’t care what they put on me. The government is my enemy; the powerful Jews are my enemy; scared-to-death Negroes are my enemy; and weak Muslims and hypocrites are my enemy! But here I stand, unfazed by a government that wants my life! I told President Trump what he was planning. He tweets about everybody else—he doesn’t tweet back at me."
"I, like my teacher, looked beyond our faults and saw our needs. I never try to judge you (as crazy as you are), because I love you. I just can’t help myself! I was born to love you. My teacher (told me), like his Teacher told him: “Take plenty. Take plenty.” I have taken plenty and I don’t complain."
"America is in deep trouble today. The Nation of Islam can help you. Those poor young children down in Parkland, Florida, at Stoneman Douglas High School: Seventeen precious lives lost. And the sheriff’s deputy, with his gun, he’s standing on the outside; he’s supposed to run to where the shots are being fired! We don’t know how many lives he could have saved, but a punk with a gun. Guns don’t make a man. A gun is an extension of your manhood—if you are a man. But if you’re a punk with a gun, and you’re looking for somebody to be afraid because you’ve got a gun, and that person is not afraid? The punk will wonder, “Oh hell, what did I run into here?”"
"I would say to the president: Mr. Trump, you’re trying to arm teachers. Teachers are not trained to use guns. You send the children to school to be taught. But when you have a racist mind you’re talking about the inner cities. You can’t come in the Black community, as a teacher, and not expect something from your Black students; so maybe you’d like to have a gun in a Black classroom so you could shoot down a Black boy or girl who is challenging you. Whether you like it or not, there is some knowledge coming to Black children that will make them challenge a teacher that is talking crap in the name of "education.""
"We thought the Million Man March was great, and it was, but when those sisters rose up all over the world (on the day after the inauguration of President Trump), that sent a message to every government on this Earth: Women have not been treated right in any government on this Earth. That man, President Donald J. Trump, made women angry. Imagine all the groping that he (has done). We’ve got a lot of gropers. And when our beautiful Black sisters go to work downtown, sometimes they will not come home and tell you what they are up against; you (men) may be home in the bed when you should have been working—she’s out there working! And the enemy feels when he’s got a woman, I don’t care whether she’s White or Brown or Black, he feels, "If I am the boss, I have the right to abuse you." And if you (women) don’t submit to that, you’ve just lost your job. We, as men, are not protectors of our women. And for that we will have to answer to God."
"The FBI has been the worst enemy of Black advancement. “Can you prove that, Farrakhan?” Yes. See, the Jews have control over those agencies of government. This enemy: he is so angry with Farrakhan, that now if you like me you have to either hide it (or lie about it), especially if you want advancement in the White man’s world."
"Farrakhan: Is the Federal Reserve owned by the government? Audience: No. Farrakhan: Who owns the Federal Reserve? Audience: Jews. Farrakhan: The same year they set up the IRS, they set up the FBI. And the same year they set up the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith... It could be a coincidence... [I want] to see black intellectuals free... I want to see them not controlled by members of the Jewish community."
"He is dangerous. Allow me to restate that. I think when he considers more the possibility of being a great leader, he will know that his charisma and personality and energy can encourage love and unity, rather than hate and division. He will see that black Americans have been here since the year 1619, and this is as much our country as anyone else's, save the Native Americans. We will all live together or not at all."
"Mrs. Clinton might have become president had the photo come out a decade earlier. It isn’t clear from the photo to what degree Mr. Obama was associated with Mr. Farrakhan. But the Congressional Black Caucus’s association is scandalous. Its members have met with Mr. Farrakhan on at least one other occasion."
"I have met – I live in Newark so we have famous Mosque 25, we have Nation of Islam there. As mayor I met with lots of folks talking to him. I have heard Minister Farrakhan’s speeches for a lot of my life, so I don’t feel like I need to do that, but I’m not one of these people that says I wouldn’t sit down with anybody to hear what they have to say. But, I live in a neighborhood where I’m getting guys on the streets offering and selling his works. I am very familiar with Minister Louis Farrakhan and his beliefs and his values."
"̇̇̇̇̇̇̇̇There can be no question about how abhorrent it is for these Democrats to be connected to Louis Farrakhan. In this case, for meeting with, and embracing, Louis Farrakhan, nothing short of resignation is acceptable from these seven Democrats."
"I know there was a relationship 30 years earlier between Louis Farrakhan and Aretha Franklin. I don’t know if that relationship continued, or whether the family invited him, but I think any president should have said, "No. If you want me on the stage, you can't have a bigot like Farrakhan sitting next to me.""
"Well, I think this has everything to do with Minister Farrakhan trying to rehabilitate himself and trying to regain - trying to gain some sort of mainstream legitimacy. If he really was on Barack Obama's side, he wouldn't say anything about him. So I think that's the first thing you have to look at. I think that's about Minister Farrakhan, you know, as his days start to dwindle down. He's had some health issues. You know, he's apologized about Malcolm X. I think this is primarily about that. And I think there's a sort of recklessness there."
"I am not up on what Minister Farrakhan has said in the last year or two, but I don't think that anything he's said in the last year or two can undo, you know, a near generation of unconscionable rhetoric. I don't think, you know, short of some major, you know, public apology and sort of ritual communistic-type, you know, self-criticism, I don't know what he could do to undo what he has done with the political stances as leader of the Nation of Islam."
"These four onstage -- Farrakhan, Sharpton, Jackson and Clinton -- have earned a nice living promoting the bogus anti-black-white-racism-remains-a-serious-problem narrative."
"It’s typical that even in defending himself against claims of anti-Semitism, Louis Farrakhan has once again invoked more anti-Jewish hatred. His remarks last night were vintage Farrakhan: A litany of tropes about how "Satanic Jews" are corrupting society with immoral acts and that Jewish writings, "promote pedophilia.""
"While the double standard is galling, there is no ethical defense of Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic remarks. Mallory’s refusal to specifically disclaim Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism is a stain on her work and advocacy. But the argument that Mallory’s interest in Farrakhan is not rooted in anti-Semitism – that she could support Farrakhan’s advocacy for black equality despite his bigoted blind spots – is a more plausible and, frankly, common posture than most of the media is willing to recognize."
"Farrakhan, after all, does not preach anti-Semitism in a vacuum, but as part of a narrative intended to name the cause of black oppression. Unlike other forms of ethnic prejudice, Farrakhan’s rhetoric is rooted less in a belief in Jewish inferiority, but in a conviction that they are responsible for black suffering – a conviction that is systemically false, but which is informed by a complicated history in which the two communities, forced into close proximity by anti-Jewish and anti-black prejudice, at times found themselves in cycles of exploitation and resentment. This is how Farrakhan could claim: “I have never hated Jews. I am critical of aspects of Jewish behavior in relationship to black people,” while also characterizing them as “devils.” Thus, Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism, while inexcusable, can be seen by some as merely a supplement to the project of black liberation – a project which many blacks understandably prioritize."
"That last question is especially difficult: a political figure has the power to substantively and positively effect broad change for the public good – even as they wreak havoc in their personal lives. As a result, punishing an erring political figure can feel like punishing the community they represent; like sacrificing the needs of the many for the good of the few. To some black Americans, Farrakhan’s contributions to the struggle for black self-determination matter more than his anti-Semitism."
"I know, none of this is my business. Blacks need no advice from outsiders. We whites are told, however, that racism is our business because so many of us are racist. On the other hand, does being in partnership with the country's most influential antisemite -- another form of deeply prejudicial stereotyping -- make Farrakhan's new allies indifferent to this infectious malignancy? Apparently so."
"Well, Louis Farrakhan is one of the leading lights of the Nation of Islam. He was a disciple of both the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. He was a very talented singer who joined the Nation of Islam in the 1950s and quickly rose as Louis X into the upper ranks of the organization, and throughout the 1960s and '70s, really became sort of this charismatic speaker who many considered sort of the heir apparent to Malcolm X. So after the Nation of Islam is reorganized under Louis Farrakhan in the 1980s, he really becomes this grassroots political leader who in many quarters is seen as the boldest critic of white supremacy during the Reagan era."
"Well, paralleling Louis Farrakhan's really, at times, very, very effective work in terms of organizing and calls for Black political self-determination has been speeches where anti-Semitic references and conspiracies prevail. So on one hand, you've got the Louis Farrakhan who's preaching Black pride and dignity and self-determination. And on the other hand, you have a version that is preaching at times anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, numerology, just different theories that some Black leaders feel unbelievably uncomfortable with, refused to participate in while others feel comfortable enough because of his real importance among the Black grassroots to participate in events like the Million Man March or just even be seen with Farrakhan, taking a picture."
"We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict." Cornel West, bell hooks, Richard Green, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Nell Painter, Albert Raby....Why are these names not as well known outside the African American community as the names of Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries? Are they, in their diversity and dynamism, less representative of the African American community?"
"We cannot pretend we do not see or hear when Louis Farrakhan predicts race war by 1986, or implies that 'Jewish editors and Jewish writers' distort the news, or threatens the life of a black reporter for doing his job, or refers to Hitler as 'a very great man,' or shakes the hands of Colonel Gaddafi. Such conduct can never be condoned -- and it must be unequivocally condemned."
"I’ve spent my life fighting discrimination in every form, from anyone. I unequivocally condemn Minister Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic and hateful comments. This vitriol has no place in our society."
"I have to say not many people intimidate me or make me nervous. However, Farrakhan is one who does. At least that's what I thought going into the interview."
"When he sat down, he immediately put me at ease. He told me I could ask him anything. So I put away my note pad with all the questions I wanted to ask and said, "How are you doing?" We had an extremely open conversation that lasted for nearly two hours. He touched on everything from his health to Barack Obama."
"Farrakhan is one person, one black person. Why is it that no black person seems to be rabid about Meir Kahane? Farrakhan is rejected by a lot of black people who wouldn't go near that man. It's not an equal standard-one black person is all black people."
"A man who has had a notorious history of homophobia, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate was now channeling such rage into misleading the same community he claims he cares about. As a Black queer man who’s always had to reckon with the complexity of Farrakhan—a person who has uplifted my Black identity while condemning my sexuality—his current stance on COVID-19 vaccination is an affront to all. His rhetoric is misinformed, misguided, mean-spirited, and divorces itself from the kind of accountability needed more than ever in the Black community."
"Farrakhan is a vile anti-LGBTQ anti-Semitic misogynist. Why is a Fox channel airing his propaganda?"
"If the Democrats have a minor socialist problem, they have a major problem in the form of Jew-hating weirdos, preeminent among them the Reverend Louis Farrakhan of the so-called Nation of Islam. Farrakhan has been an out-and-proud Jew-hating weirdo for many decades now, but Democrats still feel the need to make gestures of obeisance before him: Anti-Trump leaders such as Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March have embraced Farrakhan and courted his favor. Barack Obama came a-calling in 2005 when he was ramping up his political career. The Congressional Black Caucus has consulted him. Bill Clinton stood alongside him at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, implicitly elevating the cult leader. California Democrats Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters attend Farrakhan’s public events, and Obama-administration veteran Eric Holder recently posed for a picture with him."
"The Democrats bucked at being called socialists until their revolutionary vanguard began to come out as frank socialists. They complain about being called anti-Semites, too, which is a funny thing for friends and associates of Louis Farrakhan and Ilhan Omar to do. They can pass all the resolutions they like, but they will rightly be judged by the company they keep."
"It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for everything I'd ever been taught was right. I got all A's and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to deal with the threats. I had good manners, and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide."
"I'm not comfortable being preachy, but more people have to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court. If they took to the idea that they could escape poverty through education, I think it would make a more basic and long-lasting change in the way things happen. When we set up unrealistic goals and then don't achieve them, that's another example of internalized defeat. What we need are positive, realistic ideas and the willingness to work. Hard work and practical goals."
"In Alan Moore’s brilliant graphic novel, Batman: The Killing Joke, the Joker justifies his psychopathic behavior by philosophizing that every human being is just "one bad day away" from rejecting the polite veneer of civilization's morality in the face of an indifferent universe. To him, we are all amoral sleeper agents awaiting the secret code word to awaken us to selfish violence. Yet, even if the universe is indifferent, most people are not."
"Though movies (Taxi Driver for John Hinckley Jr., would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan), books (The Catcher in the Rye for Mark David Chapman, John Lennon's murderer) and songs ("Helter Skelter" for Tate-LaBianca murders mastermind Charles Manson) may articulate specific criminals acts, they don’t inspire the person's desire for violence. Science has proven that in numerous studies. It's tempting to blame movies, video games and rap music because they often express humanity's worst impulses, but impulses are not actions for most of us. And for the mentally ill seeking violence, anything can set them off. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel (involuntary celibate) who deliberately drove his van into a crowd in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people, said he was motivated by his resentment toward women for having sexually rejected him in favor of giving "their love and affection to obnoxious brutes." Should we then demand that studios producing romantic comedies and publishers of romance novels be shamed into contributing to anti-incel causes? The 2017 Las Vegas shooter killed 59 and injured 851 during a country music festival. Should country music bear some responsibility?"
"When Bruce closed the schools, he felt he was unburdening himself of having to prove through his students that his system had merit. He didn't want to get into that. He wanted them to evolve and teach, but It was not a thing where you have to teach what I taught. You have to teach what you learned and that's going to be more than what he taught, hopefully for those students that understood what he was doing."
"Shi'ism is a religion of doing nothing. It can never succeed without doing nothing. When it succeeds, Shi'ism is still nothing. In the Islamic context at large, it partakes in the masculinism of its transcendental deity and in the Iranian context in particular it exacerbates itself by partaking in monarchical masculinity."
"The visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity."
"While [European] national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism…in order to match, balance and thus authenticate ‘Western Civilization’."
"'Islam and globanalisation', or giving European and American space to Muslim names to denounce their own Islamic phantasms, is a new phase in the social manufacturing of domination -- using nominal Muslims against Islamic abstractions. This -- pitting lapsed Muslims against Islamic sensibilities -- is ultimately an exercise in futility. The fate of the globe, Europe included, is written elsewhere, somewhere between the lines of massive labour migration, on one side, and the global reconfiguration of the capital that systematically seeks to abuse it, on the other. The culture war this has occasioned in the meantime is a murderous nightmare for many, a lucrative pastime for some, a headache for others, and yet at the end an entirely negligible footnote to history."
"The link between Betty Mahmoody’s “Not Without My Daughter” and Azar Nafisi’s [Reading Lolita in Tehran] is the link between two phases and modes of labor migration, the moral salvation that “the West” provides, and imperial hubris. What is paramount in all of these is the denigration of local cultures as the site of actual or potential resistance to imperial domination. There cannot be any politics of resistance, aesthetics of emancipation, or prose and poetry of agential autonomy in history for people around the world—nothing except a Starbucks Coffee version of the so-called “Western classics” to go and save them. Interview with Znet."
"Otherwise lacking internal support or external legitimacy, the US empire now banks on a pedigree of comprador intellectuals, homeless minds and guns for hire. All this to momentarily manufacture consent, to secure a selective memory, and to sustain a far more enduring collective amnesia that may perhaps serve immediate US imperial purposes well, but will ipso facto sustain its self-destructive force of building fictive sand castles near the factual waves of history. This empire will not last. No empire does. If empires lasted, the whole world would be speaking ancient Persian today. Native informers and the making of the American empire."
"Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me. And now, when I look at the system here and look at my position--not just as a basketball player, but when I look around me at the values of the people and the culture and compare them with the values of where I came from--I feel so blessed to be from Africa."
"I respect a lot of players in this league. But to me basketball is just a little aspect of my life. I enjoy the game because it's fun. But it is a game."
"My life is very simple. I like simplicity and for my time to be my own, so that I have the freedom to devote the majority of it to Islam. That is the foundation from which I keep everything in perspective. I also want to let people know about Islam, how Islam can be a way of life. I want them to really understand its richness and its beauty and to see that Islam is for everybody. For me, this is the most important thing. From this, everything else falls into place."
"The people who run the show in the NBA don't know anything about Islam. I think that may also be why some people are against me personally--because I am a Muslim. It's the same way people can be against you because of the color of your skin. They don't look past these things. But it always depends on the individual."
"I believe a message of solidarity, and economic opportunity, and prosperity is going to win out, and that`s what the Democratic Party stands for, and that is where we`re going to have our focus."
"What role does faith play in my life and when do I talk about it? I talk about it when I'm asked about it. That's pretty much my rule. I don't - I believe that faith is important to Americans, but I also believe very firmly in that constitutional amendment which says Congress shall make no law establishing religion or abridging the free exercise thereof. So it's important in American life, I feel that it is absolutely inappropriate to impose my faith on anyone. But when people want to discuss matters of faith, I find myself willing to do that."
"It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I'm not saying [Sept. 11] was a [U.S.] plan, or anything like that because, you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box - dismiss you."
"Keith, a fellow outspoken progressive, had been a mentor to me in many ways."
"Gotta kill these pains Or blow out my brains To free me from these chains I'm trapped in this physical hell To walk again I just might sell my soul And I'm only twenty somethin' years old"
"So if you've had enough and are ready for your stand I'll be waiting with the stone that's in my hand."
"Give me a black goddess sister, I can't resist her! No stringy haired, blonde haired, blue eyed, pale skinned, buttermilk complexion, grafted recessive, depressive, ironing board backside, straight-up and straight down, no frills, no thrills, Miss 6 o'clock, subject to have the itch, mutanoid, caucasoid, white cave bitch!"
"Now it is time to stand up and fight back.… There are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes."
"I say you call yourself Goldstein, Silverstein, and Rubinstein because you're stealing all the gold and silver and rubies all over the earth — and it's true, because of your thieving and stealing and roguing, and lying all over the face of the planet earth."
"Tell us you lost 6 million. Historians, scholars, scientists, they went to some of the death camps. It wasn't 6 million, it wasn't 5 million, it wasn't 4 million, it wasn't even 3 million. Some of them say we'd be hard-pressed to get 1 1/2 million. Reports on the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were bloated, exaggerated, probably fabricated."
"Look these bastards in the eyes, and if anyone attacks you, already decide who will be the one to disconnect the railing where you are, and beat the hell out of them, the no-good bastards! And if you don't have a gun, every one of them has one gun, two guns, maybe three guns. In self-defense, if they attack you, take their goddamn guns from them and use their guns on them! In self-defense. Giuliani is known for taking his police and sending them off in riots. If any one of these bastards riots here today, you take their nightstick the way they did brother Abner Louima and ram it up their behind and jam it down their damn throats!"
"The white race is absolutely disagreeable to get along with in peace. No other people on the face of the earth have been able to get along with white people since white people have been on our planet."
"When white folks can't defeat you they'll always find some Negro—some boot-licking, butt-licking, buck-dancing, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkified, pasteurized, homogenized nigger—that they can trot out in front of you."
"Who are the slumlords in the Black community? The so-called Jews... Who is it sucking our blood in the Black community? A white imposter Arab and a white imposter Jew."
"We don't owe the white man nothing in South Africa. He's killed millions of our women, our children, our babies, our elders.… If he won't get out of town by sundown, we kill everything white that ain't right that's in sight in South Africa. We kill the women, we kill the children, we kill the babies. We kill the blind, we kill the crippled, we kill them all … and kill them a-god-damn-gain because they didn't die hard enough."
"Some people have said Brother Khalid was a villain, but we know he was a victim in a world that is evil. Racism and injustice are the real villains here."
"I found the speech, after listening to it in context, vile in manner, repugnant, malicious, mean-spirited and spoken in mockery of individuals and people, which is against the spirit of Islam. While I stand by the truths that he spoke, I must condemn in the strongest terms the manner in which those truths were represented."
"He has in his life and his death brought us together. That is one of his greatest legacies: that he has brought us together from all segments of the African world.… He was a constant soldier, a warrior … He wanted power for black people. That's why he reaffirmed what we taught in the sixties: Black power! … He believed we have a right to self-determination — as our organization US said — self-determination, self-respect and self-defense."
"Muhammad was the flip side to Bull Connor. The alter ego of a grand dragon. He was the mirror's image of generations of white bigots who irrationally painted all African Americans with a single broad, racist stroke. And as with the passing of all of his white counterparts, I offer Khalid Abdul Muhammad a simple eulogy: Good riddance."
"Hip Hop is prosecution evidence/ The out of court settlement/ Ad space for liquor"
"Restlessness is my nemesis/ It's hard to just chill and sit still"
"Hip-Hop went from selling crack to smoking it"
"Young bloods can't spell but they can rock you in Playstation"
"Universal ghetto life, holla black you know it well"
"Peace before everything, God before anything / Love before anything, real before everything / Home before anyplace, truth before anything / Style and stay radiate, love power slay the hate"
"Flow greatest like the greatest lakes / Capes on great estates, quiet water major waves"
"Reservations, exclusive arrangements / Dinner with the patrons, the scenery is amazing / It's so outrageous, they whisper when they say it / When it's really real it's even realer than "The Matrix""
"Steer the course, make a way / And come ashore on a greater day"
"Yo, this one here, goes out to all my players out there man, you know."
"Nobody wants to see us together, but it don't matter. No, because I got you babe."
"As life goes on I'm starting to learn more and more about responsibility."
"It's been so long that I haven't seen your face I try to be strong."
"When I see you I run out of words to say I wouldn't leave you, Cause you're that type of girl to make me stay."
"The goal of the [[War on Terrorism|war [on terrorism] ]] is more than just getting oil and fuel. The United States is intent on taking over the world... It's important we all understand that the main terrorist and the main enemy of the world's people is the U.S. government. Racism has been a weakness of this country from its beginning. Throughout history, all people of color, and all people who don't see eye-to-eye with the U.S. government have been subject to American terror."
"I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire. To me, he is in the category of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, all leaders that I admire ... [who] had severe dislike for the US government and those who held power in the US. I think all of them felt the US government and its spokesmen were all arrogant, racist, hypocritical, self-righteous, and power hungry..... You asked, 'Should freedom fighters support him?' Freedom fighters all over the world, and not just in the Muslim world, don’t just support him; they revere him; they join him in battle. He is no ordinary leader or an ordinary Muslim."
"When I think what the US military is doing, brazenly bombing country after country, to take oil resources, bringing about coups, assassinating leaders of other countries, and pitting neighbor nations against each other, and demonizing anyone who disagrees with US policy, and detaining and deporting countless immigrants from all over the world, I thank Islam for bin Laden. America’s greed, aggressiveness, and self-righteous arrogance must be stopped. War and weaponry must be abolished."
"Throughout this book, Martínez reminds readers again and again of why we should balance the wisdom of experience with the fire of youth and honor both perspectives. So many great leaders have boldly embodied this ethic, from the recently departed such as Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, and Cedric Robinson, to those who carry on like Jamala Rogers, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and Betita Martinez herself."
"This is our country too, this is not only Donald Trump’s country. He is an ignorant, divisive manipulator, and through my message I wish to convey to him and to all Muslim Americans: This is our country too."
"Nowhere but in the United States is it possible that an immigrant who came to the country empty-handed only a few years ago gets to stand in front of patriots and in front of a major political party. ... It is my small share to show the world, by standing there, the goodness of America."
"We always depended on his balanced approach to things."
"They did not call him Captain Khan, they called him 'our captain.'"
"I just can't seem to get my arms around the loss."
"Muslims are American, Muslims are citizens, Muslims participate in the well-being of this country as American citizens. We are proud American citizens. It’s the values of this country that brought us here, not our religion. Trump’s position on these issues do not represent those values."
"We still wonder what made him [Humayun] take those 10 steps [towards the car]. Maybe that’s the point where all the values, all the service to country, all the things he learned in this country kicked in. It was those values that made him take those 10 steps. Those 10 steps told us we did not make a mistake in moving to this country. These were the values we wanted to adopt. Not religious values, human values. Those values that he learned throughout his life came together and made him a brave American soldier. This country is not strong because of its economic power, or military power. This country is strong because of its values, and during this political season, we all need to keep that in mind."
"This is the time for us American Muslims to rat out any traitor who walks amongst us. This is high time for Muslims to stand firm [against terrorists], among us hides the enemies of the value system of this country. And we need to defend it. And if it means ratting out the traitors who hide behind an American passport, that’s what we need to do."
"I remember when my family arrived here and the first place we went was the , Jefferson’s ideals are the values that we have cherished as a family and as Americans."
"Like many immigrants, we came to this country empty-handed. We believed in American democracy — that with hard work and the goodness of this country, we could share in and contribute to its blessings."
"We were blessed to raise our three sons in a nation where they were free to be themselves and follow their dreams."
"Our son, Humayun, had dreams of being a military lawyer. But he put those dreams aside the day he sacrificed his life to save his fellow soldiers. Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son "the best of America.""
"If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America. Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country. Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you: Have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words "liberty" and "." Have you ever been to ? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America — you will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one. We can't solve our problems by building walls and sowing division. We are Stronger Together."
"His policies, his practices, do not reflect that he has any understanding of the basic, fundamental constitutional principles of this country, what makes this country exceptional, what makes this country exceptional in the history of the mankind. There are principles of equal dignity, principle of liberty. He talks about excluding people, disrespecting judges, the entire judicial system, immigrants, Muslim immigrants. These are divisive rhetoric that is totally against the basic constitutional principle. If you read the Constitution, you will either deliberately would be violating those principles or you have not read. That is why I have watched whole ear and rest of the world has watched, and the love and affection and support that we have received after my statement, at every corner of the street, at every place. The affection, the support, the love that I have received, that we continue to receive is a testament that he is talking about ignorance. He is not fully aware of these principles."
"Two things are absolutely necessary in any leader or any person that aspires, wishes, to be a leader. That is moral compass and second is empathy. This candidate is void of both traits that are necessary for the stewardship of this country."
"I do not believe his whole year-long rhetoric, division, excluding people, talking about them derogatorily, has prepared him. He promised to the Republican leadership that he will change his manner, he will not be as ignorant as he had been. But he had continued. Those two traits of moral compass and empathy are absolutely necessary for the leader of a free world leader of nation like United States."
"This candidate for presidency to not be aware of the respect of a gold star mother standing there, and he had to take that shot at her, this is height of ignorance. This is why I showed him that Constitution. Had he read that, he would know what status a gold star mother holds in that nation. This country holds such a person in the highest regard. And he has no knowledge, no awareness. That is height of his ignorance. She is ill. She had high blood pressure. People that know her, looked at her face, and she said, "I may fall off the stage." And I told her that, you have to assemble yourself and stand for the beauty of this tribute that is being paid. This person is total incapable of empathy. I want his family to counsel him, teach him some empathy. He will be a better person if he could become -- but he is a black soul. And this is totally unfit for the leadership of this beautiful country, the love and affection that we have received affirms that our beliefs, our experience in this country had been correct and positive. The world is receiving us like we have never seen. They have seen the blackness of his character, of his soul, that he is void of recognizing, empathizing with people."
"This nation, we live here so often -- we are here -- we become unappreciative of the goodness of this country, but we are testament to that. We live every day. I have a stack of this -- this beautiful document at my home. When guests come, I am so delighted to start the conversation by handing them a copy. Luckily, I had it in my pocket. I didn't know that I have it. My words were different. My words were: I hope you have read the Constitution. I hope you will look for the words of liberty and equal justice and equal dignity. When I was getting ready to come get in the cab to go to the convention, when I put my coat on, I touched it, and it was in my pocket. It is always -- whenever I wear a coat, it is in my pocket."
"I wanted to say, we reject all violence. We are faithful, patriotic, undivided loyalty to this country. We reject all terrorism. She asked me not to say that because that was not the occasion for such a statement. We say to his ignorance -- I address his ignorance -- that the direct effect, the most effect of the terrorism in -- the menace of terrorism had been Muslims in the world. Muslims hate this menace of terrorism as much as any other place. It is our duty to keep this country, our country, beautiful country, safe. We have always thought of that way. We will continue to do our part to keep it safe and beautiful. What he cites in the name of Islam and all that, that is not Islam at all. I wish he would have -- somebody would have put something in his head that these are terrorists, these are criminals. These folks have nothing to do with Islam."
"My wife, the brave mother of my son, Captain Humayun Khan. Hero of this country. We don't take these values lightly. We are testament to the goodness of this country. We experience the goodness of this country every day. It affirms our belief that we made the right choice. But then, to see when we got back home our four-year-old granddaughter said to her grandmother, "Why were you so upset? Why were you so sad?" A four-year-old person can feel that sadness, yet the candidate for the president of the United States cannot empathize with the people that he wishes to lead."
"I implored him (Donald Trump) to read the Constitution. Because that document, it wasn't just showing him the Constitution. I was pointing towards the values in that Constitution, enshrined foundation of this wonderful country and this nation. In another conversation, I asked and I appealed to the leadership of the Republican Party that they should disassociate themselves."
"Republican and Democrats are as patriotic as anyone else. This is a political process. It's a wonderful, beautiful political process. But in that political process, there are some moral, ethical values of this country that need to be maintained and managed."
"We are private people. We participated in this convention, because a tribute was being paid. And there was context to my conversation, was that we had been patiently been subjected to maligning of this candidate for a whole year. Enough is enough. ... Every decent Republican has rebuked his behavior; yet, nobody has stood up and said, "Enough, stop it. You will not be our candidate.""
"Republican and Democratic Party both are as patriotic as anywhere and anyone. Therefore, I am amazed at the love and care that we have received, that we continue to receive. And we will continue to speak up until this candidate behaves in a dignified manner deserving of the candidacy of this office."
"I have exactly the same rights as he does. He had been abusing, disrespecting women, judges, all decent Americans. He had been so abusive of them. I exercise exactly the same rights. That, again, proves his ignorance. He wants to have one set of rights for himself, and he wants to have another set of rights for others. No, somebody should tell him that there is equal dignity, equal protection of law in this country. That is why that Constitution came to play. I keep that in my pocket, because I cherish this document. I wish somebody would read it to him. Certain fundamental values that enshrine in this document."
"We want to maintain our dignity. We want to maintain my family's dignity, my son's dignity and sacrifice."
"Donald Trump needs to sit with his advisers and portray to this world that he is empathetic. You solve the problems with empathy, putting people together. There are bad people among us, but there are good people among us, as well. You gather good people to get rid of bad people, but you do not malign the whole religion -- the whole culture."
"We are the solution to the dealing with the terrorism in the United States. Join hands with good Muslims. Only war is not the solution. It is one of the solutions. Communities coming together is the solution. We are as concerned as Donald Trump is about the safety of this country. We are testament to the goodness of this country. We need to stop fighting with one another, but we need a leader that will unite us, not disrespect, not by derogatory remarks. I feel bad about the discourse that this campaign -- this election campaign has taken. We need to join hands. We have a very serious problem of this for the safety of the citizens of this country. We are solution. Look, the treatment of Muslims in France and other places, there is much worse security issues than United States does."
"He was a wonderful patriotic, deliberate person. The cadets of his school come to our home to pay tribute to him every year. We invite them to our home for a particular purpose. We give them a copy of the same Constitution that I have. I have a stack of it at home. There is a reason behind that, and that reason is for people to know when they step -- they comment."
"There are messages in here that we are all the same, regardless of our religions. Unite us, not divide us. Our cultures that follow these religions unite us. There is peace and harmony in these religions; and Captain Humayun laid the path for that. He -- I will give you one simple example of his character -- how he was. At University of Virginia in the basketball court, there were two teams used to play. African-American students and white American students always playing separately, not playing together, not talking to one another. He was the one that, one step at a time, he will drag one player to here and one player from there and bring them together. And in few weeks, the whole team was playing together. We received a delegation of those students after passing, and they said, "For all of our life he taught us how to come together." That is what he was. That is who he was. And to him, we pay tribute by this small gesture of trying to bring some peace in this political discourse. Trying to bring some respect towards each other. That is what he was. That is dedicated to his spirit."
"A man comes to him (Donald Trump), a veteran, so kindly, what a gracious man, hands him his Purple Heart. What he does, he deceives, thanks, puts in his pocket. Later on, pulls it out. I got this Purple Heart, so easy, I always wanted one. Donald Trump, you had the time, you did not serve. You know what he should have done? And listen to me and I want his surrogates to listen to me. You should have pinned that back to that veteran's chest. He wants to be the leader, commander in chief of this United States of America? That is the thoughtfulness? He should have put that Purple Heart back if he would have been sensible, he would have known what it takes to earn that Purple Heart."
"I really don't need any apology. My family doesn't need any apology. Apology is not what I am looking for. It is the empathy of his thinking and his thinking, the emptiness, the void. His thinking is totally void of empathy. So, apology is not needed. His saying my son is hero or not, that doesn't change anything. Today, somebody sent me the pictures of his grave site. Amazing, amazing outpouring of love and respect and flowers and people lined up there to pay respects and all that. That is more than enough for me. That is not going to come from Donald Trump or his surrogates."
"What is important to me now is that end this back and forth, back and forth that had been lack of caliber on the other side. Just imagine and I want to indulge all of his surrogates, after we made the speech, if Donald Trump would have not taken that cheap shot at the gold star mother, we'd not be having these conversations, these discussions. Sometime for a candidate for a higher office has to have the capacity to bear with the criticism. If I had exercised my First Amendment rights as Mr. Trump does, as Donald Trump does, again and again and again, as he had been maligning Hillary Clinton, calling her names and other leaders, if he can exercise the freedom of his speech rights, so can I. But he is the candidate for the highest office, a much larger caliber is needed, tolerance, patience. When a person becomes , president, you are president and Commander-in-Chief of everybody that has supported you and that has not supported you."
"I have no concern, I have no link, I have never been of that thought of that. I assure you I am an educated person. There is and I hope that other not so thoughtful Republican leaders are listening, there is constitutional amendment in the constitution of United States and that is called equal protection of law under 14th Amendment. Sharia Law as we have titled, there is no such thing as Sharia Law. These are laws of various Muslim countries which are hodgepodge of British laws, French laws, Portuguese laws. In there, there is tremendous discrimination of genders which disqualifies them under the constitution of the United States, cannot be implemented, cannot be brought. How can I be a person that has read this, I preach that, that I do not stand for any Sharia Law because there is no such thing."
"Lack of understanding, lack of factual correctness, it's just nothing but political vote pandering. They are trying to create this fear in people's mind. They have come up with this terms and these terminology that they continue to talk about without really knowing the facts about what they are talking. I want to put a footnote in front, I received information from where my website was, it is down now. This is the maliciousness and Donald Trump should say to his surrogates that no more, no more harm, no more ugliness. I received the call from the host of the website saying that we are receiving tremendous amount of hits and especially on certain pages of your website. I have a three-page small website and there is a risk that somebody will damage it, somebody may hack it. I asked them what do you suggest. They said under such circumstances, we normally keep it offline when this madness will go away, we will bring it back. I asked them to do that. To which I began to then receive e-mails and calls why your website is down, why your website is down. This is the ugliness of this discourse. There could be some civility in this discourse. It is a political discourse, of course. There could be some discussion of policy and all that instead of personal ugliness."
"So I am not engaging anymore because I see no hope, I do see hope where the people who are thinking to vote for this candidate, I think it is plenty clear, his surrogates will not admit, it's plenty clear to the world that this person is not fit for the office he's seeking. He wants to do everything, I will do it by myself, I will do it in democracy, you cannot do this. That is against the basic principle of democracy."
"Because without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart."
"You can sacrifice yourself, but you cannot take it that your kids will do this."
"We asked if there was some way he (Humayun Khan) could not go, because he had already done his service. He said it was his duty. I cannot forget when he was going to the plane, and he looked back at me. He was happy, and giving me strength: “Don’t worry, Mom. Everything will be all right.” ... I begged him to be safe. I asked him to stay back, and not to go running around trying to become a hero, because I knew he would do something like that. He said, “Mom, these are my soldiers, these are my people. I have to take care of them.” He was killed by a car bomber outside the gates of his base. He died trying to save his soldiers and innocent civilians."
"You know hearts of pain can never heal as long as we live. Just talking about it is hard for me all the time. Every day, whenever I pray, I have to pray for him, and I cry. The place that emptied will always be empty."
"Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could? Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?"
"Donald Trump said that maybe I wasn’t allowed to say anything. That is not true. My husband asked me if I wanted to speak, but I told him I could not. My religion teaches me that all human beings are equal in God’s eyes. Husband and wife are part of each other; you should love and respect each other so you can take care of the family. When Donald Trump is talking about Islam, he is ignorant. If he studied the real Islam and Koran, all the ideas he gets from terrorists would change, because terrorism is a different religion. Donald Trump said he has made a lot of sacrifices. He doesn’t know what the word sacrifice means."
"There is no greater sacrifice than to lay down one's life for their country, and that's the sacrifice that Captain Humayum Khan made fighting to defend our freedom and our constitutional rights. He was a true American hero. The Khan family deserves nothing less than our deepest support, respect, and gratitude, and they have every right to express themselves in any way they choose. I am appalled that Donald Trump would disparage them and that he had the gall to compare his own sacrifices to those of a Gold Star family."
"Read the truth about your hero, Mr Khan who used his son as Political Pawn."
"Mr Khan, shame on you & #CrookedHillary (Hillary Clinton) for not being truthful to all in attacks at @realDonaldTrump (Donald Trump)."
"Khizr Khan's speech made me cry because it was even necessary for anyone to say Muslims can be real Americans."
"I don’t think it would be harmful if they apologized to him and he apologized to them, but I don’t see that happening. ... Well, for one thing, if you accuse someone of something that’s not true, it usually is a reasonable thing to acknowledge that. ... Rather than make this a one-sided issue, why don’t we all just, say, back off a little bit, we have such important issues to deal with, and you know, let’s just call a truce. And the best way to call a truce is simply to say, ‘I’m over that. You’re over that. I’m sorry I said this if it offended you."
"Mr. Khan, paid the ultimate sacrifice in his family, didn't he. And what has he heard from Donald Trump? Nothing but insults, degrading comments about Muslims, a total misunderstanding of what made our country great, religious freedom, religious liberty. It's enshrined in our Constitution, as Mr. Khan knows, because he's actually read it."
"Khizr Khan, the Muslim "Gold Star Father" who harangued Americans at the Democratic National Convention, with a mute, hijab-wearing wife at his side, is just another in a long string of human shields liberals send out to defend their heinous policies. ... Does anyone know what Khan thinks of gays? How about miniskirts? Alcohol? Because I gather we're going to have to turn all our policies over to him, too. What have you sacrificed, Barney Frank??"
"Khizr Khan's words were powerful but in a society less deficient in public rhetoric nobody would be surprised he spoke w/o notes."
"Attacking the Khan family: Trump ISIS The worst of the right-wing media"
"Do they believe that it, not the Constitution, ought to govern the United States; that democracy ought to be the basis upon which we govern ourselves, representative government? Those are all absolutely inconsistent with the program that as is now a matter of record. This fellow, Khizr Khan, absolutely embraces, supports and is seeking to promote Sharia. Anderson Cooper, last night, he’s on his program, and he says, quote, ‘I do not stand for any sharia law because there is no such thing,’ you gotta say, Steve, A, that’s taqiyya – that is, lying for the faith – and B, it is demonstrably fraudulent. I’m sorry to say that this couple lost their son and a hero at that, but this is about the central question of our time. Will we, as in Europe, be induced to submit to Sharia by importing still more of the people who believe that it’s God’s will to impose it upon us?"
"Two of the highly promoted speakers at the Democratic National Convention were Khizr Khan and his wife, Ghazala Khan, Muslim parents of a fallen soldier. And today, yet again, the DNC-run media featured these same Muslim parents of a fallen soldier on . The pity is, these Muslim parents were not decrying the Islamic texts and teachings behind this bloody war and the reason why their son went to war. Instead, they attacked …… Trump. Even the death of their son could not move them to oppose jihad terror, but to attack those of us who do. And this is the platform of the Democrat Party. More Democrat exploitation for cheap political gain."
"Khizr Khan told ’s Sunday morning that terror has “nothing to do with Islam.” This is a bold-faced lie. And if’s he’s read the Qur’an, he knows. This is the very definition of taqiya."
"Donald Trump rightly criticized the Khan parents. Clearly, Trump does not oppose Muslim soldiers serving in the military. Nonsense. Trump opposes Muslim immigration from jihad-hot regions. We know Islamic terror groups are plotting attacks on the West and using the migration to import their soldiers."
"In Yiddish there is an expression, en the gonif brent a hiddle (on the thief the hat burns.) Khizr’s skullcap is burning."
"Mr. Trump has crossed the line. More than one line. Captain Khan died in battle trying valiantly to save others. There is no place for criticism, stated or implied, of this brave soldier. He served our country. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery along with those of many ethnic backgrounds and religious denominations. They served our country. Mr. Trump did not. Criticizing Mrs. Khan for not speaking on stage is vile beyond words. No Gold Star Mother should ever be treated like that. Mr. Trump, you owe Mrs. Khan and all Gold Star families a huge apology."
"There's only one way to talk about Gold Star parents: with honor and respect. Capt. Khan is a hero. Together, we should pray for his family."
"There’s the all mighty powerful ones like Mr. Khan — which is a con artist himself, and he uses the death of his son, who’s an American soldier, which we respect and honor, and he uses that to go after Trump, which I found very distasteful."
"I met Khizr and Ghazala Khan. They are kind and wonderful people. We all can learn from this family."
"As devout, faithful Muslims, [the Khans] know perfectly well what the commandments of their faith are, now, they may not be obedient to those commandments, and that’s their right as long as they live in a free country like America, but the commandments of the faith are still there, and a Muslim like their son who died fighting against other Muslims has died an apostate, and they know that, and they yet chose to highlight that infidelity of their son before an international audience of millions."
"I think we have to understand that there are a couple of messages going on. The father, of course, is a lawyer. He works on immigration matters, helping to bring Muslim immigrants into the country, and his objective there was a political one to smear Donald Trump, who has spoken out against the unrestrained import, unvetted influx of Muslims who cannot be properly screened and called for a temporary moratorium on such immigration until the United States can work out a proper screening protocol for such Muslims."
"I wouldn’t call it penance, I would call it collaboration, Muslims heard and understood that the political message Trump must be defeated because if he is not, the jig is up for all of those who support the Islamic supremacist objective promoted by jihad and Sharia and certainly immigration of non-vetted Muslims into this country would certainly be curtailed at least for a time, the message that many Americans have heard is, you know, this is a grieving father and mother of a hero son, and that is also true, but there are two messages and we just have to realize that there are two, for any Muslim in America who truly does love this country and truly is patriotic, I’ve always felt, especially after 9/11, that’s when I first started talking about these kinds of things, it really does fall on them to distinguish themselves"
"[Khan] stood up there and pretended and fed the American people and everyone else listening a load of hogwash that this is not what Islam is, that Islam is not about jihad and Sharia, and of course, he was lying, ... the Islamic State is the truest expression of Islam in the world today. So Mr. Khan at the very least was being dishonest with us, I was incensed, I felt he had no right to wave the Constitution and to insult Mr. Trump in the way that he did. Just to insult an American, any of us, to wave the Constitution and say you haven’t read it, what Mr. Khan does not know about the American public school system when Donald Trump was raised, you better believe each and every one of us memorized that thing practically, so that’s just ridiculous. He knows not what he’s talking about, and also, Clare, just what you alluded to, that faithful Muslims can’t embrace our Constitution, can they? Not if they’re going to be faithful to the doctrine of Islam, no."
"I'd like to say to Mr. and Mrs. Khan: thank you for immigrating to America. We're a better country because of you. And you are certainly right; your son was the best of America, and the memory of his sacrifice will make us a better nation -- and he will never be forgotten."
"ISIS is saying regardless of Mr. Khan the elder saying it's a religion of peace, they are laughing at him saying, 'it's not a religion of peace and your son died an apostate,' who is a non-believer, an infidel. An apostate is a better way to say it... Mr. Khan should be saying what can we do to defeat this. He is a Muslim, Pakistani born, and all the work that he's done in Saudi Arabia especially with bringing in migrants. We should be using people like Mr. Khan to how are we going to defeat radical Islam rather than yelling at each other back and forth. ... There was no mistake he came out for the Clintons. He's worked for the Clintons before and there have been three presidential elections since his son was killed. They could have come out for -- this is one he decided to come out for."
"Donald Trump and I believe that Captain Humayun Khan is an American hero and his family, like all Gold Star families, should be cherished by every American. Captain Khan gave his life to defend our country in the global war on terror. Due to the disastrous decisions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a once stable Middle East has now been overrun by ISIS. This must not stand. By suspending immigration from countries that have been compromised by terrorism, rebuilding our military, defeating ISIS at its source and projecting strength on the global stage, we will reduce the likelihood that other American families will face the enduring heartbreak of the Khan family."
"Mr. Khan is the one that went out and struck the first blow, and in a campaign, if you're going to go out and think you can take a shot at someone and not have incoming coming back at you, shame on you. I think the Democrats used him in a way that quite frankly I'm not sure I approve of. We love our veterans, we love our Gold Star families, but the fact of the matter is Mr. Khan politically used his time on that stage to go after Donald Trump, why in the world he thought that he would get a free ride with that is beyond me. He shouldn’t get a free ride when he’s going to inject himself in the political arena."
"He (Donald Trump) was speaking specifically to the reports that the father (Khizr M. Khan), who is a strong proponent of Sharia Law. And actually writing about it and how the Constitution should be subordinate to Sharia Law."
"From my perspective, it is the responsibility of Mr. Khan to distinguish himself from , from the Muslim Brotherhood, whose treatise is to destroy us from within. If he is a patriotic, loyal, American Muslim, then we want to hear that, that’s great, and we grieve with them over the death of their son. But do not disparage Americans or Donald Trump for having concerns about Muslims in our midst."
"If you are so concerned, Mr. Khan, if you’re an American first, then distinguish yourself and condemn Islamists, condemn the Muslim Brotherhood, then we will listen to you, and stop waving the Constitution. As far as I can tell, Islam, truly, supporters of Islam and the Quran, cannot embrace the Constitution. Now, if you have a different view, then explain that to us and then maybe we can be persuaded, but don’t shame America for having genuine and rightful concerns about Muslims in our midst when we have no idea who they are or what they really believe, and we’re not even sure about you, sir, because we know about taqiyya, which is the practice of lying to the infidel in order to advance the Muslim cause. ... So I’m sorry, we’ll not be shamed. I’m sorry for the loss of their son and I hope he is a loyal American. But I think a loyal American Muslim would be more like , who is very clear about where he stands, who was very patriotic and loyal and totally distances himself from Islamism, so if that’s the case for this gentleman, then he should’ve said that on the platform rather than shaming us for having concerns about Muslim immigration."
"We know that he has written quite a bit about the superiority of sharia law, and sharia law covers every area of life and those who adhere to it do not respect or honor other law, they may pretend to but they don't."
": Do you think that mr. Khan wants to subject or kill americans?"
"America's greatness is built on the principles of liberty and preserved by the men and women who wear the uniform to defend it. As I have said on numerous occasions, a religious test for entering our country is not reflective of these fundamental values. I reject it. Many Muslim Americans have served valiantly in our military, and made the ultimate sacrifice. Captain Khan was one such brave example. His sacrifice—and that of Khizr and Ghazala Khan—should always be honored. Period."
"One of the most moving moments of any convention that I've ever been to."
"What The Media Is Not Telling You About The Muslim Who Attacked Donald Trump: He Is A Muslim Brotherhood Agent Who Wants To Advance Sharia Law And Bring Muslims Into The United States."
"The Muslim who attacked Donald Trump, Khizr Muazzam Kahn, is a Muslim Brotherhood agent, working to bring Muslims into the United States. After reading what we discovered so far, it becomes obvious that Khan wanted to ‘trump’ Trump’s Muslim immigration."
"Khan’s fascination with Islamic Sharia stems from his life in Saudi Arabia."
"It is likely that Khan is a Muslim plant working with the Hillary Clinton campaign, probably for the interest of Muslim oil companies as well as Muslim immigration into the U.S. ... It is obvious that Khan is upset, that a Trump victory will eliminate and destroy decades of hard work to bring in Islamic immigration into the United States. ... Is it likely that Khan’s son was killed before his Islamist mission was accomplished? Only another type of investigation will determine that. Do they ever mention how many soldiers have died because of Muslim traitors? Do they ever bring up how many Christians in the US military were killed? Yet the modernists and homosexuals continue to attack Christians. But soon everything we need to know will be uncovered. As we say in the Middle East: the snow always melts and the sh*t under it will soon be revealed."
"The whole reason of us looking into Khan’s writings is that it debunks the notion that Khan was simply a ‘secular Muslim’ who could care less about strict Sharia. But Sharia is Islam and Islam is Sharia. Period. The fact that Khan was Muslim should suffice. However, the fact that Khan is a Sharia scholar and an expert on Islamic jurisprudence makes it even clearer that Khan is an Islamist who thanked Saeed Ramadan, a father of the Muslim Brotherhood for using his sources. ... Shouldn’t this suffice? To the anti-Christian crowds, it doesn’t, nothing will, nothing will ever will. To the Muslim Brotherhood, if the Muslim can produce a suicide bomber, the liberal can produce national suicide. And if in doubt, just see how one man (Khan) caused Donald Trump to decline a notch."
"It is no surprise that the is thrilled about Khizr Khan’s “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump,” even though Khan, not quite accurately, claims that Trump wants to “ban us from this country.” Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states. In any case, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan today overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens."
"Khizr is using his son’s memory not to advance the cause of the United States, as his son apparently died trying to do, but to advance a quite different cause: that of the global umma."
"All this disinformation and obfuscation he is perpetrating serves the interests of the global umma – but not in any sense those of the United States."
"Khizr Khan is more than just the father of slain Muslim U.S. serviceman Humayun Khan and the mainstream media’s flavor of the moment in its ongoing efforts to demonize and destroy Donald Trump. As far as the Obama administration and Hillary campaign are concerned, he is a living validation of the success of their strategy against “extremism”: by refusing to identify the enemy as having anything to do with Islam, they draw moderate Muslims to their side and move them to fight against terrorism. By contrast, Trump, in their view, alienates these moderates and drives them into the arms of the terrorists."
"That all sounds great. There’s just one catch: Khizr Khan, and the Clinton campaign, have extensive ties to the Saudis – far more extensive than any possible connection that Donald Trump’s campaign may have had to Russia’s alleged involvement in the leak of emails that revealed that the entire Democratic Party presidential nominating process was rigged from the start. Not that the mainstream media will pause from speculating about Trump and the Russians long enough to tell you any facts about Khizr Khan, Hillary and the Saudis."
"The big story of foreign influence in this presidential election is not some vague imaginings about the Russians supposedly hacking Democratic National Committee emails showing the Democrats engaged in indisputably unethical behavior. The real foreign influence story in this election involves the Saudis and the Democrats. Saudi influence in Washington must end. Khizr Khan represents an all-out effort by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party establishment to maintain that influence. In light of that, Donald Trump was right to answer his attacks, and should have been even stronger in his responses. It’s time for the United States of America to regain its independence."
"Mr. Khan more than an aggrieved father of a Muslim son- he's Muslim Brotherhood agent helping Hillary."
"I am dismayed at the attacks Khizr and Ghazala Khan have endured after they spoke about their son's service and sacrifice. There is never enough honor we can show to the families of those whose loved ones have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. Service to our country is above politics. I believe that each of us are called every day to show our deepest respect and gratitude to all of those who protect our freedom and their families."
"He doesn't know. He doesn't know that. I saw him. He was, you know, very emotional and probably looked like a nice guy to me. His wife, if you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me. But plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet. And it looked like she had nothing to say. A lot of people have said that. And personally, I watched him. I wish him the best of luck."
"Well, that sounds - who wrote that? Did Hillary's scriptwriters write it? ... I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I've done, I've had tremendous success. I think I've done a lot. ... I think they're sacrifices. I think when I can employ thousands and thousands of people, take care of their education, take care of so many things, even in military. I mean, I was very responsible, along with a group of people, for getting the Vietnam Memorial built in downtown Manhattan, which to this day people thank me for."
"Captain Humayun Khan was a hero to our country and we should honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe. The real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him, and the efforts of these radicals to enter our country to do us further harm. Given the state of the world today, we have to know everything about those looking to enter our country, and given the state of chaos in some of these countries, that is impossible. While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Mr. Khan who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things. If I become President, I will make America safe again."
"Mr. Khan, who does not know me, viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over T.V. doing the same - Nice!"
"This story is not about Mr. Khan, who is all over the place doing interviews, but rather RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM and the U.S. Get smart!"
"The Kahn family has gotten hours and hours of airtime and what's ironic about that was Hillary was the one that left them on the roof in Benghazi. It was Hillary's policy that crippled Libya and Syria and Iraq."
"The White Man does not want to mix, and the Black Man want to be himself, not somebody else. He does not want to mix! Only the boot-licking so called ‘Negro’ comes to another race begging to ‘mix’!"
"America represents herself as a Christian nation. ... They profess to be a friend and defenders of all peace-loving and freedom-loving people. The only people we really see that they want to be friends of are themselves and their kind. They are really sincere when they say that they are freedom-loving people. Above all, the White man the world over wants to be free to rule and dominate the aboriginal people."
"But let them tell you what type of an Apostle or prophet God promised them. Was it a man from some of the enemy colleges and universities with an arm full of degrees coming from these institutions of learning of the enemy?Let them read their scriptures and see what type of man God promised to choose for a last messenger. How many of the prophets in the past were educated men of the civilization in which they were born before the call of God?"
"I have always been respectful towards the Messenger and his followers. What happens in the Nation of Islam and around it is very important. ... The Nation of Islam has survived and that is a very significant development."
"Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka and other black male leaders have righteously supported patriarchy. They have all argued that it is absolutely necessary for black men to relegate black women to a subordinate position both in the political sphere and in home life."
"I appreciate the countless messages of support I have received from the people... who understand how difficult and deeply personal this has been for my family and especially my children. I remain honored to be a part of a campaign that is uniting the diverse voices of our district – long term residents, East African immigrants and students."
"I am America’s hope and the president’s nightmare."
"I am much more interested in defending my ideas than defending my identities."
"The reasons for weaponizing division are not mysterious. Racial fear prevents Americans from building community with one another and community is the lifeblood of a functioning democratic society. Throughout our history, racist language has been used to turn American against American in order to benefit the wealthy elite. Every time Mr. Trump attacks refugees is a time that could be spent discussing the president's unwillingness to raise the federal minimum wage for up to 33 million Americans. Every racist attack on four members of Congress is a moment he doesn't have to address why his choice for labor secretary has spent his career defending Wall Street banks and Walmart at the expense of workers. When he is launching attacks on the free press, he isn't talking about why his Environmental Protection Agency just refused to ban a pesticide linked to brain damage in children."
"In 1991, you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush... I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful... You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a 'fabulous achievement...Yes or no: Do you still think so?...The American people want to know that any time we engage a country, that we think about what our actions could be and how we believe our values are being furthered.... Whether, under your watch, a genocide will take place, and you will look the other way because American interests were being upheld, is a fair question. (Questions & Comments were made during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday regarding President Trump's Venezuela envoy Elliott Abrams)."
"When we talk about waking people up from complicity, is to say that we can’t be only upset with Trump because he’s not a politician who sells us his policies in the most perfect way. His policies are bad. But many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was. And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile."
"A number of baseless rumors have been made recently about my personal life and family. I will say it again here: they are absolutely false and ridiculous. That said, I will offer clarity and share a difficult part of my personal history that I did not consider relevant in the context of a political campaign, so that we can put these rumors to rest and return to what really matters: how we join together to build a more prosperous and equitable district and state. In 2002, when I was 19 years old, Ahmed Hirsi (whose name before he received citizenship was Ahmed Aden), the father of my children and love of my life, and I, applied for a marriage license, but we never finalized the application and thus were never legally married. In 2008, we decided to end our relationship in our faith tradition after reaching an impasse in our life together I entered into a relationship with a British citizen, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, and married him legally in 2009. Our relationship ended in 2011 and we divorced in our faith tradition. After that, he moved home to England. I have yet to legally divorce Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, but am in the process of doing so. Insinuations that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is my brother are absurd and offensive. Since 2011, I am happy to say that I have reconciled with Ahmed Hirsi, we have married in our faith tradition and are raising our family together."
"The boys were protesting a woman's right to choose & yelled 'it's not rape if you enjoy it' ... (archived)"
"They were taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants ..."
"Sandmann's family hired a right wing PR firm to write his non-apology."
"A US backed coup in Venezuela is not a solution to the dire issues they face. Trump's efforts to install a far right opposition will only incite violence and further destabilize the region. We must support Mexico, Uruguay & the Vatican's efforts to facilitate a peaceful dialogue."
"We cannot hand pick leaders for other countries on behalf of multinational corporate interests. The legislature cannot seize power from the President, and Venezuela's Supreme Court has declared their actions unconstitutional."
"If we really want to support the Venezuelan people, we can lift the economic sanctions that are inflicting suffering on innocent families, making it harder for them to access food and medicines, and deepening the economic crisis. We should support dialogue, not a coup!"
"it’s not enough to have conversations with folks who don’t vote; we have to give them a reason to go to the polls. That’s why adopting policies and finding candidates who speak to the needs of working people isn’t just the right thing to do, it is critical for our party’s long-term success. When we unequivocally challenge corporate influence in our politics, we speak to millions of working people. When we support progressive priorities such as Medicare-for-all or a Green New Deal, we motivate young people. When we support cries for police accountability and field candidates from these movements, we speak to people of color who are most likely to be brutalized by police. This includes reexamining foreign policy. Decades of endless wars have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars — money that should be invested in educating our young people, caring for our seniors and housing our homeless."
"I get the urge to focus on disaffected Trump voters. Democrats pride themselves on being a big-tent party. We want to show disaffected Republicans that there’s a political home for them outside Trump’s GOP. But appealing to these voters while alienating more progressive, diverse nonvoters doesn’t make sense. For every moderate, suburban Republican on the fence about Trump, there are lines of cooks, homeworkers, dishwashers, cashiers and farm workers who would vote a straight Democratic ticket if they were just given a reason to do so. My message to my colleagues across the country is simple: Don’t listen to Trump. Speak to the people who need us the most. Focus on those who don’t have a voice and who will support our boldest and most enduring ideas as a party. Give nonvoters a reason to turn out to vote. That’s who this party should be for. It’s who this party should be talking to. And it’s who we should be counting on to build a coalition to defeat Trump in November."
"When you're a Democrat, the media makes you have to answer for every broken window and thrown bottle by protestors, regardless of what they’re protesting or where. But when actual GOP & Trump supporters [...] call & cheer for assassinating Democrats... silence."
"He effed around and found out."
"We are motivated by radical love of country. We fight for universal healthcare because of love. We fight for a livable planet because of love. We fight for equitable housing because of love."
"Stop saying "we can't afford" Homes for All, Green New Deal or Medicare for All. 'If we didn't spend trillions on endless wars and tax breaks for millionaires, we could afford to house our homeless, care for our seniors, and save our planet. We suffer from greed, not scarcity."
"Our criticisms of oppression and regional instability caused by Iran are not legitimate if we do not hold Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to the same standards. And we cannot continue to turn a blind eye to repression in Saudi Arabia—a country that is consistently ranked among the worst of the worst human rights offenders.”"
"Education had always been deeply prized on both my mother's and father's sides of the family. For a period when Awoowe, my paternal grandfather, lived with us back in Somalia, he would call me into his room each morning before I left for school to make sure I understood that I was a beneficiary of the attributes of Araweelo, a Somali queen who fought for the rights of women and the disenfranchised."
"I truly believe the America that we all want and deserve is not just a myth but a place that could actually exist. But only if we work for it, and not just individually-not just for ourselves, our families, or our ethnicities, religions, or other groups to which we belong. We need to work for it together."
"The more invested we are in one another, the better all of us ultimately will be. This is the philosophy of interconnectedness that I operate on as a legislator in a country where there is enough abundance to achieve all our goals. It is the opposite of the myth of scarcity, where what's mine necessarily takes away from yours. We become obsessed with who has more and depressed about all that we lack. This mentality is what pits minority groups against one another in a fight for scraps. Those propping up the status quo are happy to see us so distracted. I would like to reframe the old adage that one person's gain is another's loss. I want your loss to be my loss; your gain, mine, too."
"we can't eradicate problems unless we put ourselves in the shoes of those impacted by the solutions we implement."
"Ensuring that the democratic system is prepared for all the challenges it faces ignites me to this day. From increasing access for new Americans united in their excitement to participate to reaching out to the disillusioned to explain the purpose of their involvement, those who are conscious of what isn't working have a responsibility to figure out how to make it better. But it all starts with just showing up, and that's something all of us can do."
"War doesn't restore. It just robs. It takes everything."
"I'm centered by the hijab, because it connects me to a whole set of internally held beliefs."
"I'm a Muslim and live as such, but I'm also a humanist. Just as I believe in God, so also do I believe that we are all connected no matter our faith, belief in science, race, or country of origin. We all have an ability to enrich one another not in spite of our differences but because of them."
"As a refugee who has escaped tragedy, you never stop thinking about all those who didn't make it out, how much they suffered and how many died."
"It's my belief that in public service, if you aren't making someone uncomfortable, you aren't doing your job."
"When I stood up for Noor, I was standing up for every single Somali-not just on that day but every day forward. As I later wrote in an op-ed for the Star Tribune: "I am a 31-year-old Somali-Muslim woman, a mother of three and an unapologetic progressive. Some suggest that as a woman, I meddle in political affairs and need to be "put in my place." Some say I deserved what I got because my opinions are contrary to those of a few male political leaders in our community. In addition, a small group has decided that one Somali elected official is enough and now the community should sit down and be quiet." I would never be quiet, even if threatened with violence. If a Somali candidate wants to run for office of his own free will, no permission from the political establishment is required."
"Your success and the successes of others you inspire can heal your wounds."
"I believe you get what you organize for"
"From the Muslim ban onward, I had the painful realization that even though most of what the administration was going to throw at us was very personal in that their proposals would have an actual impact on me and those that I love, I couldn't grieve because I had to show up for my constituents and the country. At least when I was fighting for them, I was no longer afraid."
"My brand of optimism is based on my denying myself any sense of victimization and taking comfort in the fact that whatever difficulties present themselves today, they will not exist tomorrow. I believe that by pushing hard enough, you will eventually end up somewhere better. Some have observed that I have an "iron spine." I prefer to see it as a process of figuring out how to channel every challenge into an opportunity. That mentality, which worked in the state house, has always worked for me."
"Living authentically is the best form of resistance."
"I am a human, not a figurehead."
"One of the most toxic misperceptions of my faith is that because I'm a Muslim, I hate Israel and the Jewish people. Although that couldn't be further from reality, whenever I criticize Israel, it is filtered through this lens."
"You can't take away the past; you can only add to the narrative. There is a narrative about Muslims that already exists. I'm not here to undo or rewrite history. That is propaganda or an impossibility. What I, and others, can do is expand on the notion of what it means to be Muslim, continue the story line that survives alongside us."
"We all have our blind spots."
"Freedom of thought and speech-the essence of what it means to be human-is my right no matter the color of my skin or my religion. It's the right of people who speak with accents or whose hair texture is different. Religious minorities, the formerly incarcerated, those without bank accounts or homes, the neurodiverse. No label should rule out participation."
"The politics of "moral clarity and courage," which I often reference, includes lending one's voice and listening. There is no way to do the kind of work I do, to have the honest dialogues that lead to solutions to constituents' issues, without bumping into things and hurting others. That's just human nature. Ideally, though, I remedy it. While not popular in the Trumpian vision for America, introspection and contrition are signs not of weakness but of strength."
"My hijab is a personal reminder of the tension between submission and struggle."
"I ran for government precisely to challenge the systemic injustices faced by those perceived in our society as not worthy."
"There has never been a member of Congress who looks or sounds anything like me."
"My strength doesn't come from a lack of fear but from an overpowering sense of moral outrage."
"I want to help all those who feel small to feel large; to give strength to all those who believe they are weak; to make loud those who think they are voiceless. To me, that is the American dream."
"I'm still on the journey to find our America. Although it might not be the reality every day for everyone in this country, the American dream isn't just something immigrants talk about who are coming to or want to come to this land. It is part of the American psyche and ultimately what we citizens of the United States are all searching for."
"anger is misplaced on individuals. It should be directed at the way society is set up. Then it should be used to change the way society is set up."
"to those fighting for democracy and the right to vote each and every day: never give up."
"I think, for many of us, you know, 2016 was going to be an election year where we were going to decide what kind of country we were going to be. It was very clear that on one side there was someone running for president who presented an extreme danger, not only to our democracy, but to the very lives of the American people. ..our presence, really, and our elections were not only to resist the harmful policies that are coming from this administration and that have now become the norm, but it’s to restore hope."
"I always find an opportunity in every challenge. And I know that at this moment, we have had an opportunity to see every — every broken system reveal itself. We have had an opportunity for people to recognize what they are not only losing, but what they could gain. We have had an opportunity to allow for the racists and the bigots to fully tell on themselves. And we have had an opportunity for people who have never really imagined themselves fully powerful in the corridors of power to recognize that they cannot be muzzled, intimidated and silenced, that we are not ever going to be dismissed unless we allow ourselves to be dismissed."
"I think the shock that our presence really has brought is that for too long people have gotten used to having mediocre white men show up and think they own the day, without anybody ever questioning their credentials, their qualifications and their vision for a broken America. And for the first time you have women, who should be apologetic, who should feel small, who might visibly be small, who come in and know their place, understand their power, fully execute their vision and never, never really look shaken by the insecurities that many who thought they were powerful feel now that their power is challenged. And so, for me, I feel like, you know, people are often wondering, like, “If you’ve got all of these challenges, Ilhan, how do you still continue? Or why do you all feel like you thrive in your controversies?” And it’s because we don’t live in controversy. We live in constant struggle for the truth, and we live in constant struggle in remaking America in its image of freedom and liberty for all, not the image of the past, but the image of what the future of America should look like."
"when we engage in the creation of our foreign policy, we are truly disconnected from the foreign nations that it will impact and the humans who are going to be impacted by our foreign policy. And so, even as we think about capitalism and we think about our trade policies and we think about the creation of jobs and we think about the fight for unionized labor here, oftentimes when we talk about dignified workplace, we don’t connect that to be something that someone else deserves in another country. And so, when you’re thinking about Mexico or Honduras or El Salvador or any of these countries that we might ship our jobs to and have a working environment there, we don’t think about the fact that these organizations, these corporations are now going to be exploiting workers over there. It’s not just that we are losing jobs, but there is literally going to be an exploitation of workers over there."
"I condemn the horrific acts we are seeing unfold today in Israel against children, women, the elderly, and the unarmed people who are being slaughtered and taken hostage by Hamas. Such senseless violence will only repeat the back and forth cycle we've seen, which we cannot allow to continue. We need to call for deescalation and ceasefire. I will keep advocating for peace and justice throughout the Middle East."
"Just as we honor the humanity of the hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians and 9 Americans who were killed this weekend, we must honor the humanity of the innocent Palestinian civilians who have been killed and whose lives are upended."
"Bombing a hospital is among the gravest of war crimes. The IDF reportedly blowing up one of the few places the injured and wounded can seek medical treatment and shelter during a war is horrific."
"You get what you organize for!"
"A “pro-life” agenda looks like: gun safety laws, universal school meals, Medicare for All, universal pre-k, combating the climate crisis"
"Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel."
"It's all about the Benjamins baby."
"I am told every day that I am anti-American if I am not pro-Israel. I find that to be problematic and I am not alone. I just happen to be willing to speak up on it and open myself to attacks."
"I am sure @AOC and every member of Congress who cares about children will sign on. Super proud of @BettyMcCollum04 for her leadership on this issue"
"Ilhan Omar and myself, for the experiences that we all went through—I mean, and it wasn’t Muslims that elected us. It was non-Muslims. That is a huge, again, inspirational, powerful message. And I feel like this—you know, people call it the blue wave and the pink wave and the Muslim wave. It’s this rainbow that is like coming to Congress...all of the people that are running are just an incredible array of what we really love about our country and the beauty of our country. And I can’t wait to hold her hand as we walk through the halls of Congress. She brings so much courage. I was like, “Please don’t let me be the only one, Ilhan.” And she’s like, “I got it.” And so, I’m thrilled that Congresswoman-elect or candidate Omar will be joining me."
"If they had been wise, Israel’s friends, supporters and lobbyists in America might have held their peace. After the election of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to congress – both supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel...But no. The sky fell. She was “vicious” in her views, wrong on facts, potentially antisemitic, a “strategic threat” to Israel itself.... Is the boycott and divestment campaign against Israel which Alexander supports – along with congresswomen Tlaib and Omar – really “delegitimising” Israel, as her critics claim? Or is Israel delegitimising itself by confiscating land which does not belong to it? And if the brave and liberal members of America’s Jewish community who condemn Israel are regularly smeared as “self-hating Jews”, what does that make Alexander?"
"Pelosi and Schumer know damn well that @IlhanMN (Ilhan Omar) was not engaged in anti-semitism and they intentionally conflate criticizing AIPAC with attacking Judaism and Jewish people. Omar hit a tripwire and the full force of the party was brought down on her."
"Omar’s latest Jew-hatred isn’t the beginning of her story. In 2012 she tweeted: "Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel." In 2013 she chuckled over Hamas and Hezbollah and suggested that the American military was akin to Al Qaeda. She supports the anti-Semitic BDS movement. She said last month that Israel cannot be a democracy and a Jewish state. She’s not hiding the ball here."
"This is all so ridiculous. It’s all based upon this demand that we indulge what everybody knows is an utter and complete fiction, which is that we’re allowed to talk about the power of the NRA in Washington, we’re allowed to talk about the power of the Saudis in Washington, we’re allowed to talk about the power of big pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street and Silicon Valley and the fossil fuel industry in Washington, but we’re not allowed to talk about an equally potent, well-organized and well-financed lobby that ensures a bipartisan consensus in support of... Israel, that the minute that you mention that lobby, you get attacked as being anti-Semitic, which is what happened to Congresswoman Omar... For a long time, the bipartisan piety was not just that the U.S. has to support Israel, but that, in particular, the effort to boycott Israel in protest of its occupation of Palestine is not just misguided, but anti-Semitic. That’s the official position of the Democratic Party, of Hillary Clinton, of Chuck Schumer, of every leading Democrat. What the congresswoman said is very uncontroversial. Everyone knows AIPAC is an extremely intimidating lobby, just like the NRA is. There’s nothing wrong with pointing that out. There’s certainly nothing anti-Semitic about saying that, about criticizing the Israeli government for its aggression and militarism. And anybody who cares about Palestinians and about the ability of Muslims in the United States to be able to speak freely ought to be defending her."
"Anti-Semitism has no place in the United States Congress, and Congresswoman Omar is, terrible what she said, I think she should either resign from Congress or she should certainly resign from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. What she said is so deep-seated in her heart, that her lame apology, and that's what it was, it was lame, and she didn't mean a word of it was just not appropriate. I think she should resign from Congress, frankly. But at a minimum, she shouldn't be on committees, certainly that committee."
"Why did Omar’s 2016 campaign literature reference Ahmed Hirsi as her “husband” when she hadn’t yet divorced Ahmed Elmi or married Hirsi? Why did Omar say in her 2017 divorce filing that she’d had no contact with Elmi since June of 2011 when she was seemingly photographed with him in London in 2015? Why has Elmi not put the matter to rest by coming forward and explaining the nature of his relationship with Omar?"
"Fine, we’re all against anti-Semitism... We fought against anti-Semitism for years in that context of fighting against white supremacy and racism. But this isn’t about what she (Ilhan Omar) said... It’s about the fact that she is a Muslim African immigrant, a Somali refugee, who is talking about Palestinian rights, who is talking about the power of the Israel lobby, and the big pharma lobby, and the lobby for fossil fuels. And that’s not OK... And that’s why she’s facing death threats."
"@IlhanMN is a powerful moral voice at time when very few (even progressive) Democrats speak clearly and knowledgeably on foreign policy. She deserves unreserved support."
"What I fear is going on in the House now is an effort to target Congresswoman Omar as a way of stifling that debate. That’s wrong Anti-Semitism is a hateful and dangerous ideology which must be vigorously opposed in the United States and around the world. We must not, however, equate anti-Semitism with legitimate criticism of the right-wing, Netanyahu government in Israel."
"We are Jews who stand with Representative Ilhan Omar. She has been falsely accused of anti-Semitism since tweeting that GOP threats against her and Representative Rashida Tlaib for criticizing Israel were “all about the Benjamins baby.” When asked to clarify who is paying members of Congress “to be pro-Israel,” Omar replied, “AIPAC!” There is absolutely nothing anti-Semitic about calling out the noxious role of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), which spends millions each year to buy U.S. political support for Israeli aggression and militarism against the Palestinian people. As the NYC chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace summed up: "Accurately describing how the Israel lobby works in this country is not anti-Semitic. The never-ending smear campaign against Ilhan Omar is racism and Islamophobia in action.” There is no denying that money rules U.S. politics, and that powerful lobbies from the NRA to the fossil fuel lobby to AIPAC play destructive, anti-democratic roles in our political system, wielding money for legislative influence. The pro-Israel lobby has played an outsized role in producing nearly unanimous congressional support for Israel. It has organized a national campaign to suppress Palestinian activism on campuses, made the Israel Anti-Boycott Act a legislative priority, and for decades has boasted about their power to make or break political careers. To point out this reality is not anti-Semitic."
"A large number of proud Jewish Americans – raised to believe in civil liberties and open discussion – are appalled by the campaign to muzzle Rep. Ilhan Omar, as well as Speaker Pelosi’s role in it. We’re also appalled that human-rights-abusing Israel is virtually off-limits to debate. Most Jews – the likes of Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner excepted – empathize with the refugee experience. Only a rare few cannot be impressed by the life story of Ilhan Omar, who fled civil-war-torn Somalia and came to the U.S. as a refugee at age 12, knowing only two English phrases: “hello” and “shut up.” Now a Muslim Congresswoman, she’s recently faced hateful bias and threats. Rep. Omar has made a simple and undeniable point – that AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the funding it influences exert extraordinary power over Congress. Disputing that point is flat-earther terrain. The Capitol Hill farce of an “anti-hate” resolution would provide still more evidence on behalf of her argument. Unfortunately, all the vague media references to Rep Omar’s “anti-Semitic remarks” obscure how truthful and non-hateful those comments were."
"“I don’t think our colleague is anti-Semitic,” Pelosi said afterwards. “She has a different experience in the use of words, doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning that she didn’t realise.” Omar, who came to the US as an eight-year-old, is a college-level graduate of the American educational system, but she apparently cannot understand English as it is spoke; Jamana Hayes has a point."
"Omar is an intersectionalist’s fantasy made flesh. A black Muslim woman immigrant, she hates capitalism and Israel, calls Donald Trump less than human, and believes that Jewish money is corrupting American politics. She isn’t exactly enamoured of the nation that has given her refuge and then promoted her to high office, either. But patriotism, like plastic surgery, is for older Democrats."
"Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is a fearless, pioneering badass with a titanium backbone"
"Representative Ilhan Omar is not just pushing America to live up to its best ideals-she's showing us how the struggle for inclusion and solidarity can transform our communities in the here and now."
"Ilhan has been an inspiring figure since well before her time in Congress. This book will give you insight into the person and sister that I see-passionate, caring, witty, and above all committed to positive change. It's an honor to serve alongside her in the fight for a more just world."
"Four of the most dynamic women of color in Congress – representatives Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib"
"No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later. People began noticing that Ilhan and Southside were often with a very effeminate young guy. He was very feminine in the way he dressed — he would wear light lipstick and pink clothes and very, very, short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him. Southside and Ilhan both told me it was Ilhan's brother and he had been living in London but he was mixing with what were seen as bad influences that the family did not like. So they sent him to Minneapolis as rehab. When Southside and Ilhan got married, a lot of people were invited. It was a big Islamic wedding uniting two large clans in the Minneapolis community. I would say there were 100-150 people there. When she married Elmi, no one even knew about it. So the scandal was about Southside's brother-in-law more than Ilhan's brother. She said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school. We all thought she was just getting papers together to allow him to stay in this country. Once she had the papers they could apply for student loans. They both moved to North Dakota to go to school but she was still married to Southside. In the Somali way, the only marriage that mattered was the one in the mosque. Ilhan came back to Minneapolis all the time to see her family, but her brother didn't come with her. They never parted."
"I am grateful for Congresswoman @IlhanMN for taking a stand for our treaty rights, and more importantly standing for our water."
"That Trump's supporters believe Omar's sins justify her banishment and Trump's similar transgressions justify his presence in the White House helps illustrate exactly what is going on here. Under Trumpism, no defense of the volk is a betrayal, even if it undermines the republic, and no attack on the volk's hegemony can be legitimate, even if it is a defense of democracy."
"Ilhan Omar must be defended, but not because of her views on Israel, gay rights, or progressive taxation. You needn't agree with her on any of those things; in fact, you needn't like her at all. But she must be defended because the nature of the president's attack on her is a threat to all Americans-black or white, Jew or gentile-whose citizenship, whose belonging, might similarly be questioned. This is not about Omar anymore or the other women of color who have been told by this president to "go back" to their supposed countries of origin. It is about defending the idea that America should be a country for all its people. If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere. What Americans do now, in the face of this, will define us forever."
"Hypocrisy is wretched because the hypocrite says with his tongue what is not in his heart. He wrongs his tongue and oppresses his heart. But if the heart is sound, the condition of the tongue follows suit. We are commanded to be upright in speech, which is a gauge of the heart's state."
"We live in the age of Noah (a.s.) in the sense that a flood of distraction accosts us. It is a slow and subtle drowning. For those who notice it, they engage in the remembrance of God. The rites of worship and devotion to God's remembrance (dhikr) are planks of the ark. When Noah (a.s.) started to build his ark, his people mocked him and considered him a fool. But he kept building. He knew what was coming. And we know too."
"When the Prophet says "brother", we should interpret this as universal brotherhood, which includes Muslims and non-Muslims."
"One of the things that I see in the United States happening, that is troubling to me, is a lot of young Muslims are abandoning those thawabit, those things that really... Once you begin to abandon them, your religion unravels. Like pulling the thread on a woven garment."
"To me, in political terms, McConnell is actually far worse than the . The Grim Reaper only comes once in our lifetimes -- at the moment of death. In contrast, McConnell has been killing legislation for years. Add to that, McConnell has now gone beyond killing bills to helping embolden Donald Trump's worst instincts. [...] There's no way to stop the actual "Grim Reaper." But, with McConnell, there's one way to retire him. He is up for re-election in November 2020. And before you dismiss the notion that McConnell could lose, keep in mind that a recent poll from McConnell's home state of Kentucky shows him with about a 33% favorable rating, while over 50% hold an unfavorable view. The people of Kentucky may just have had their fill of McConnell, who appears to take joy in killing legislation that will help our nation. Kentucky voters could retaliate and act as the "Grim Reaper" -- bringing McConnell's political career to an end."
"I see America for what it is. It's another Germany. It's the Fourth Reich. America makes Hitler's and Germany's records look good."
"It is because of America's racism that black people and colored people around the world are oppressed. Throughout history black people who spoke out against America and her racism have been subjected to exile, assassination, murder, or imprisonment. So what happened to me is nothing new or different. Justice is a joke in this country for black people, and it stinks of its hypocrisy. Justice in this country means "just-us white folks." Black people must understand that there is no redress of grievances in the courts but only in the streets, through armed guerrilla action."
"Of course I'm a racist, just like Lyndon Johnson, like Kennedy, like Lincoln, like Washington, like all Negroes—because all Negroes are racist. Everybody who lives in America is either racist or will become one. One cannot stay neutral: one must stand on one side or the other, without mixing colors or ideas—white with white, black with black. Integration is impossible. We are not interested in it and don't want it."
"When a race of people is oppressed within a system that fosters the idea of competitive individualism, the political polarization around individual interests prevents group interests. Each negro prides himself on his ability to reason or think as an individual. Therefore, any gains are to the individual and not to the group."
"White folks get all righteous and wonder why Black people steal and gamble. Same reason white folks do. We need money, because the society says you must have it to keep from starving. If you got it, you eat. If you don't, tough. But white people are able to make their stealing and gambling legitimate. White man'll sell you a $20 suit for $50 and call it good business. What he actually did was steal $30. White man'll buy a watch for $5.00 sell it for $49.95 and call the difference, profit. Profit is a nice word for stealing which the society has legitimatized."
"America is a country that makes you want things, but doesn't give you the means to get those things."
"But this is the kind of education we were subjected to. Education ain't just what comes out of the books, but it's everything that goes on in the school. And if you leave school hating yourself, then it doesn't matter how much you know. Education in america has to be viewed as propaganda machinery. All educational systems are propaganda machines, but for Black people, the american educational system is a propaganda machine we don't need. It propagandizes against us. It makes us hate ourselves."
"I was always at odds with teachers. There are certain things in negro institutions that you have to do if you expect to make good grades and certain things you don't do. One of those things is you don't talk back. You don't challenge the existing order. Well, I challenge anything that doesn't make good sense."
"If authority is to be used, it should not be a coercive type thing. After all, what dictates that a person can be put in an authoritative position over someone else? If it's experience, then respect should come from that, not authority. People should adhere to rules because they respect them and not because some position mandates that respect."
"In negro america, anything the teacher or the preacher or the doctor says is law. Not because it's right, but because of who said it. In white america, if the President or Senator Dipshit says it, no one challenges it. It can be wrong as hell, but everybody applauds anyway. I don't give a shit who says what. If the muthafucka is wrong, he's wrong."
"In this country, authority is a cover for wrong. I don't respect wrong and I don't respect authority that represents wrong."
"The whole concept of authority has to be redefined. People have to understand that individuals, not positions, merit respect. Negro america and white america assume that positions mandate respect. When this respect for position does not materialize, they begin to utilize force. This is why the Black world has rejected both negro america and white america and their ideas of authority."
"It’s really challenging that idea of who is a hero, who has made contributions to society, but then also not historicizing it, so we’re really putting it in the present because that’s what modern media is so much about…"
"It really was harmful because it makes it feel for women, for LGBTQ folks, for even white men too, that there are only these tokens and that’s not the case. What it does is reinforce white supremacy, it reinforces patriarchy. It’s harmful to everyone, not just the people who are being erased."
"I just haven't experienced a lot of the ridiculousness, you know? I haven't been around that long…I’m constantly shocked. Whenever I'm doing work, a large part of that work is going to be reacting, and I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily — me being surprised but still wanting to change things."
"I try to give folks the tools and resources to be a part of a movement…I'm a very strong believer in the idea that everybody has a place in the movement."
"Magic makes for a slippery concept. Like "gender," "race," or any other term that can be picked apart as a social construction—which of course means all of our terms, every attempt at producing order through language and —the word "magic" does not simply express a straightforward, self-evident reality, but rather creative reimagining on the part of everyone who uses it. Magic's meaning is continually shaped and reshaped by changes in our knowledge, values, and prejudices. Scholars writing about magic today, when confronted with the matter of definitions, often chose to simply admit the incoherence and uselessness of the topic and then move forward with their projects."
"The process of establishing in Muslim society is neither simple nor straightforward. There is not one strategy, one method or one process. What works today may be unsuccessful tomorrow."
""Religion of peace" does not imply that Islam is a pacifist religion, that it rejects the use of violence altogether, as either a moral or a metaphysical evil. "Religion of peace" connotes, rather, that Islam can countenance a state of permanent, peaceful coexistence with other nations and peoples who are not Muslims...This position, I shall argue, is no more than the result of an objective application of principles of Islamic jurisprudence which no jurist or activist, medieval or modern, has claimed to reject."
"For much of Islamic history, the unit through which the Sunna was preserved, transmitted, and understood has been the hadīth (Arabic plural, ahādīth ), or a report describing the words, actions, or habits of the Prophet. Unlike the Quran, the hadiths were not quickly and concisely compiled during and immediately after Muhammad’s life. Because hadiths were recorded and transmitted over a period of decades and even centuries, they are not in and of themselves contemporary historical documentation of what Muhammad said and did."
"Shah Wali Allah had been a late addition to his family. His father, Shah 'Abd al-Rahim, had long been one of the most respected in the Mughal real, and his talents and austere piety had won him and then cost him royal favor decades before his most famous son was born. When Shah Wali Allah was five, his father placed him in the school he supervised, and by seven the boy had memorized the Qur'an. He mastered Arabic and Persian letters soon thereafter and was married at fourteen. A childhood spent studying at his father's feet meant that by sixteen he had completed the standard curriculum of law, theology and logic along with arithmetic and geometry. A year later, Shah Wali Allah would recall poignantly, his father and greatest teacher 'Voyaged onward to the above of God's mercy.' The young student's ambition to seek ilm remained strong, and by nineteen he had exhausted the Knowledge of Dehli's scholars. So Shah Wali Allah voyaged across the Indian Ocean to perform his hajj pilgrimage and pursue his studies in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In the Prophet's mosque in Medina, at the feet of scholars from across the Muslim world, he studied a book to which he became exceedingly attached and which he viewed as the foundation for understanding the Prophet's Sunna. It was the Muwatta, the 'Well Trodden Path,' of the eight-century scholar of Medina, ."
"No compulsion in religion’ (2:256) was a Qur'anic command revealed in Medina when a child from one of the Muslim families who had been educated in the town's Jewish schools decided to depart with the Jewish tribe being expelled from Medina. His distraught parents were told by God and the Prophet in this verse that they could not compel their son to stay. The verse, however, has been understood over the centuries as a general command that people cannot be forced to convert to Islam."
"As noted earlier, marriage and a male's ownership of a female slave were the two relationships in which sex could licitly occur according to the Shariah. In marriage, the consent of the wife to sex was assumed by virtue of the marriage contract itself. In the case of the slave-concubine, consent was irrelevant because of the master's ownership of the woman in question. As Kecia Ali has noted, there is no evidence for any requirement for consent from slave women in books of Islamic law in the formative centuries of Islam. Books of Islamic law and natural ethics are full of exhortations for husbands to enter in foreplay and stress the wife's right to orgasm. But such books also foreground Hadiths and laws obliging wives to meet their husbands' sexual needs without contest. [...] In the Shariah, consent was crucial if you belonged to a class of individuals whose consent mattered: free women and men who were adults (even male slaves could not be married off against their will according to the Hanbali and Shafiʿi schools, and this extended to slaves with mukataba arrangements in the Hanafi school). Consent did not matter for minors. And it did not matter for female slaves, who could be married off by their master or whose master could have a sexual relationship with them if he wanted (provided the woman was not married or under a contract to buy her own freedom)."
"The Shariah offered protection to both wives and slave-concubines, but it came not under the rubric of consent but that of harm. By definition, the crime of rape (i.e., forced zina) could not occur within a licit relationship. But transgressive harm could still be done by the man. Wives and concubines could complain to local judges if they were being abused or if his demands for sex were excessive (we will discuss the issue of concubinage and consent in the concluding chapter of this book). The Hanbali scholar Buhūtī (d. 1641) even says that if a master forced a slave woman unable to bear intercourse to have sex and injured her, she would be freed as a result... "According to the Quran, both marriage and ownership (in the case of the female slave and her male master) were relationships in which sex was licit (Quran 23:5-6). Within these relationships, consent for sexual relations was assumed or irrelevant. In marriage the relationship itself entailed ongoing consent for sex, and with a female slave it was not needed (assuming the slave girl was soley owned by one man and not married; in both cases she was off limits). Kecia Ali has observed that there is no evidence for any requirement for consent for sex from slave women in books of Islamic law from the eighth to the tenth centuries""
"Here the Shariah historically worked differently from modern laws on marital rape, which originated in the 1970s. But the effect is similar: protection. Within marriage, wrongs regarding sex were not conceived of as violations of consent. They were conceived of as harm inflicted on the wife. And in Islamic history wives could and did go to courts to complain and get judges to order husbands to desist and pay damages. So yes, non-consensual sex is wrong and forbidden in Islam. But the operating element to punish marital rape fell under the concept of harm, not non-consent"
"I didn’t know that people could be bigoted even as they were smiling at you. It’s hard to understand when you see people saying that they love you, but they’re afraid of you at the same time."
"At some point, political pragmatism has to reckon with the reality of climate change. You can’t negotiate with science. You can’t meet it halfway."
"People in the penthouse are giving too much to charity? Awesome! But they're also shaping society without our consent. Not awesome! And as long as there are people with so much money in so much power, we'll have no say. The only real solution here is making sure that they're not that rich in the first place."
"This problem is so much bigger than individual bad cops. There is a separate legal and political framework that shields cops from consequences, gives them special rights when defending themselves, and often trains them to fear the communities that they’re supposed to protect."
"Look, I know this seems like the part where I make an impassioned argument for why immigrants are good for America. You know the hits. “This country was built on immigrants. They boost the economy. Rihanna.” That’s all true. But that is not why we have asylum. We have asylum because it is the morally right thing to do. These are people escaping murder and kidnappings and gang violence."
"We eventually transitioned out of shock and into mourning. As Muslim Americans, however, we also had to contend with fear as well. We were held responsible, as a group, for the terrorist attacks or seen as a threat. Suddenly our religion was dangerous and our American-ness called into question. The comedian Hasan Minhaj put it so well in his Netflix special, Homecoming King: On September 11, "everyone in America felt like their country was under attack," he said, but on September 12 and so many nights after that, I felt like my family's love and loyalty for this country was under attack.""
"Most allopathic doctors think practitioners of alternative medicine are all quacks. They're not. Often they're sharp people who think differently about disease."
"In the past Americans were not able to understand what Islam was. They thought it to be a religion that came from outside. After 9/11 this has changed. Now either out of fear or curiosity they are interested in learning about it. Only 20% of Americans have passports and few of them know a second language. They don’t understand the world well. When they suffered an attack like 9/11, their first reaction was anger. However, as time passed, Americans understood that they could not isolate themselves from the rest of the world and sit somewhere on their own."
"I understand that people in Turkey get angry with White House’s decisions and anti-Americanism has increased; but I think at least for a couple of years Turkey should tolerate the US’s behavior; because even today the majority in America thinks that Islam is a kind of a religion like it is lived in Afghanistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia. However, the Islam there is not the same as hearing from my uncle what the prophet did or going to the [sic] saying prayers or learning about the teachings of religion. I think this is why the Americans have moved rather towards a more fundamentalist attitude. The Americans will find the way to the center from the edges eventually. America is a nation that has helped the world in the last 100 years; of course they made some mistakes, like other countries did; but they like the Turks and support them."
"Teddy Roosevelt to me was the ideal Republican. He was someone who felt strongly about the need for individuals to make the place work better without having someone tell them how to do it. But they had an obligation to do that as well. It wasn’t a favor for the country; it was an obligation as Americans."
"There was a kid in front of me who was 10. My dad, just to pass the time, said, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ The kid said, ‘I don’t know, I’m 10.’ My father waited until he was out of earshot and said: ‘I never want you to tell me that if I ask you that question. I never want you tell me you don’t know. It’s O.K. if you change your mind. But I never want you not to have a vision of what you want to be.' I told him that day that I wanted to be a doctor. And I never changed my mind."
"I’ve always felt that, when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn’t say, ‘Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open-heart operations.’ I’ve probably done 5,000. Am I any better at it than 10,000? It’s just a different number on the tombstone."
"The great thing about America is that you can hold on to whatever heritage you come from. We celebrate the different cultures, so I had the privilege, as the son of immigrant parents, to grow up American while staying deeply in touch with my Turkish roots. I have a great deal of family back in Turkey, I lived there for a period as a boy and I served in the Turkish military, which is compulsory for dual citizenship."
"The reality is that our brains are completely dependent on the nutrients we put in our body. I would never trust someone to make those food decisions for me. I'd always carry my food in my pocket. That's why I advocate nuts, which you can put in your pocket, no one will know it. If you soak your nuts it's even better because they get moisture and you can enjoy them, they feel like a regular meal."
"I would take us all back a thousand years, when our ancestors lived in small villages and there was always a healer in that village—and his job wasn’t to give you heart surgery or medication but to help find a safe place for conversation."
"The only question my father ever asked me was: Did anyone do better than you? If I came home, proud and excited, with a ninety-seven on an exam, he would ask if somebody got a higher grade. And if George or Tom got a ninety-eight then I might as well have failed. When I made all-state football, which was a big deal for me, he didn’t ask me what it was or comment on it. He thought sports were a distraction. When his friends congratulated him at work the next day, he didn’t know what they were talking about."
"But this is one of the fundamental disconnects between Western medicine and what people often refer to as complementary medicine. Not everything adds up. It’s about making people more comfortable. I offer things like massage therapy, and offered Reiki if people wanted it. I did not recommend it, but I let people know it was their choice."
"Your genetics load the gun. Your lifestyle pulls the trigger."
"As a Turk, growing up in America with one parent from one side of the religious wall and one parent from the other side, and of course America clearly supporting the secular background, I found myself tugged more and more towards the spiritual side of the religion, rather than the legal side of the religion."
"Pennsylvania needs a conservative who will put America first, one who can reignite our divine spark, bravely fight for freedom and tell it like it is."
"It’s a good sign for the Republican Party that somebody of his standing and stature would want to run under the Republican banner."
"Look it. It's, let's face it, it it's easy to joke about Dr. Oz. I mean, some of these remedies he's pushed on TV - the raspberry ketones and the lavender soap and the palm oil for dementia. But you know what? That matters. Because if somebody who knows better, who knows better, is willing to sell snake oil just to make money, then he's gonna be willing to do anything and say anything to get elected. Even if it's not good for you. And Pennsylvania, you deserve someone that's that's honest with you. You deserve somebody who cares about you. You deserve somebody who will tell you what they really think, what they really believe. That won't be looking to see what Donald Trump tells them they should be doing or thinking because it's expedient. Somebody who's gonna work for you every day and fight for you."
"I have never been unfaithful to my husband. (I know, I know, he’s totally hot, but every other night on call gets old fast.)"
"Mehmet is a kind of modern evangelist. He is keenly intelligent and charismatic. Mehmet was always unique, but now he has morphed into a mega-brand. When he tells people the number of sexual encounters they need each year to improve their lives in a specific way, or how to lose weight in three days—this is simply lunacy. The problem is that he is eloquent and talented, and some of what he says clearly provides a service we need. But how are consumers to know what is real and what is magic? Because Mehmet offers both as if they were one."
"When he made it O.K. to talk about the shape of a good poop, I knew he could talk about anything. He always found ways to make the human body endlessly fascinating."
"Are we not allowed to be Palestinian on Instagram? This, to me, is bullying. I am proud to be Palestinian (from my father descendent)."
"Muslims are stuck between a rock and a hard place: foreigners invading their lands on the one hand and the homegrown menace of Islamic extremists on the other. It’s a catastrophe."
"If you go to my website [www.bendib.com], you’ll see that my slogan is “The Pen is Funnier than the Sword”—which I really believe. I’m committed to non-violent change."
"Because of my ethnic background, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a huge issue for me—it hits me very hard on many different levels."
"The common denominator between all my cartoons is rebellion against blind conformity."
"What I liked so much was their freedom from the constraint on time. When I went back to Morocco it occurred to me that [in the United States] we don’t have this wonderful calm. They are daydreaming, what we would call in the west, ‘wasting time.’"
"It struck me at some point after the Arab Spring and the nuclear disaster in Fukushima—both following closely in the footsteps of the Wall Street meltdown—that epochal changes seemed to be finally happening all around us. The hubris of so many tyrannies, whether they be political, economic, or ecological, was starting to be challenged by large masses of people in so many different countries at the same time, and it occurred to me that the title Too Big to Fail would fit equally all these seemingly disparate juggernauts. I must say I have really enjoyed drawing these cartoons. For the first time in my career, despite the various ups and downs that can be expected in revolutionary times, hope finally seemed to be pointing its nose at the end of the tunnel (to mix metaphors like a pro.)"
"Humor is often born out of pain, misery, or anger. ..Humor for people like me functions as a way to maintain our sanity. It also serves to sweeten the bitter pill of truth that I try to administer to readers who are sometimes reluctant to be challenged in their political beliefs. First you read, then you catch yourself wondering why this is funny, and then realize that the joke actually makes a good point that you may not have thought of. Humor is there to disarm and deconstruct conventional wisdom and preconceived ideas."
"I’m an idealist and an optimist: all my political work is aimed at helping usher in a better world. I believe that political cartooning should be almost a form of activism, not just idle commentary for the sake of commentary."
"I never start from a drawing, as some people imagine. I always start from a precise idea that I mull and perfect until the cartoon is ready to be drawn. This is not conceptual or performance art. There is little room for improvisation, and every barb is premeditated. You decide what topic you’ll tackle, zero in on the absurdity contained within, find a gag, a symbol, or a pun to encapsulate it and then—and only then—draw to the best of your ability."
"Khalil Bendib, with a few ingenious strokes of his pen, gets to the heart of the issues of our time. His cartoons are in the greatest tradition of American political humor, with that combination of wit and intelligence so needed in the struggle for justice."
"Bendib is an equal-opportunity skewer. The more a subject or victim is ignored by the mass media, the more he infuriates, informs, and intensifies the reader's attention. Cartoons need to jolt. Bendib obliges page after page."
"(Bendib) presents a perspective that I think is simply lacking in any meaningful way in the mainstream American media, he brings a cultural and nuanced understanding that goes a long way in helping Americans understand the Middle East."
"Damn G, the spot's getting hot/So how the fuck am I supposed to make a knot?/Police looking at niggas through a microscope/In L.A. everybody and they momma sell dope/They trying to stop it/So what the fuck can I do to make a profit?/Catch a flight to St. Louis/That's cool, cause nobody knew us."
"To make your own choices, but be thoughtful about them, not rash."
"As long as you had that grounding, as long as you had that place where you knew you could draw strength, where you knew you had a strong family to support you, everything was going to be OK."
"Diplomacy is about meeting the world with open eyes, attuned listening and small gestures of outreach. It was second nature to Hillary Clinton."
"So much of what happened to me professionally felt like I was floating in a cauldron, and so much about this book is about taking control"
"When I was a little girl, I believed that my life would somehow be different from the lives of everyone around me"
"I have never wavered from the belief that public service is a worthy profession, that the reward is worth the risk, that the stakes are too great to turn away from the calling."
"Take a chance. Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. And don’t fall in love with Plan A."
"Don't let fear hold you back. Fear is just a thought, and thoughts can be controlled. Embrace the unknown, and you'll find your real potential.(https://thechiefsdigest.com/andrew-tate-quotes/)"
"[On how he would respond to a woman if she accused him of adultery.] It's bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch."
"[On his move to Romania, avoiding rape charges being "probably 40% of the reason"] I'm not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free."
"[Tate's comment from one of his videos.] I inflict, I expect, absolute loyalty from my woman [...] I ain't having my chicks talking to other dudes, liking other dudes. My chicks don't go to the club without me, they are at home."
"absolutely a misogynist (YouTube video)"
"I'm a realist and when you're a realist you're sexist. There's no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist. (same YouTube video)"
"playing a comedic character (statement to The Guardian)"
"Internet sensationalism has purported the idea that im [sic] anti women when nothing could be further from the truth. (statement to The Guardian)"
"Romania is a beautiful place. There's no feminists, there's no open homosexuality. [...] No homosexual agenda. No feminists. It's corrupt, which suits me because I'm fucking rich. [...] No immigrants or refugees which is great because it means no one gets stabbed."
"I love Trump, he’s the best we could ever have hoped for."
"[On a need for authority over the women he dates.] You can't be responsible for a dog if it doesn’t obey you."
"[In response to the claims of sexual assault made against Harvey Weinstein.] If you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must [bear] some responsibility. I'm not saying it's OK you got raped."
"[On his assertion women are men's property.] I'm not saying they're property [...] I am saying they are given to the man and belong to the man."
"[In a video for Hustler's University, considered a scam by the media, on how to gain further recruits via online comments.] What you ideally want is a mix of 60-70 per cent fans and 30-40 per cent haters [...] You want arguments, you want war."
"Hello @GretaThunberg I have 33 cars. My Bugatti has a w16 8.0L quad turbo. My TWO Ferrari 812 competizione have 6.5L v12s. This is just the start. Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions."
"It appears the insanity of the ruling elite is exposed worldwide now. They have one command, do not speak out, behave as sheep."
"The more you didn't like it, the more I enjoyed it. I f**king loved how much you hated it."
"This is a set-up. It is absolutely disgusting. Thirty of those girls say we have done nothing wrong. Two are the mothers of our children."
"[W]hat he is doing today online fits every international definition of radicalisation. It takes a situation where there is a power imbalance and suggests that the one with the power is actually the minority. It is how all radicalisation works. These young people have been groomed. It starts with a viral YouTube video of a takedown of a feminist argument. It starts with a picture of a woman with a black eye. It is a drip, drip, drip, which eventually leads to real-world consequences."
"Tate was a very important voice for an emasculated ... you three guys, you are all 25, you are all kind of being told you can't be blokes, you can't do laddish, fun, bloke things ... That's almost what you're being told. That masculinity is something we should look down upon, something we should frown upon. It's like the men are becoming feminine and the women are becoming masculine and it's a bit difficult to tell these days who's what."
"And Tate fed into that by saying, "Hang on, what's wrong with being a bloke? What's wrong in male culture? What's wrong in male humour?" He fed into those things. His was a campaign of raising awareness, his was a campaign of giving people perhaps a bit of confidence at school or whatever it was to speak up."
"[He] maybe took that alter-ego of masculinity too far in his relationships with women."
"Andrew Tate is probably the most famous internet celebrity in the world right now. In recent weeks he has been Googled more often than the President of America, more often than Donald Trump and more often than most major pop stars. As of this week, the #AndrewTate hashtag has over 12.7 billion views on TikTok."
"It is no secret that the internet is awash with ugly and harmful content. However, it is rare when someone like Andrew Tate rises to become one of the most famous people on social media because of their harmful content. While many are already speaking out against Tate, there is a legion of (primarily male) supporters who consume, venerate and share his dangerous content. Here in the UK, it is not an exaggeration to say that many young students returning to school at the end of the summer holidays will have seen something produced by Andrew Tate. The effect that Tate’s brand of vitriolic misogyny can have on the young male audience is deeply concerning. His content is widely celebrated by his fans for having brought back "traditional masculinity". However, we also know that misogyny can be a gateway to other extreme and discriminatory views, and there is a serious danger that some people, sucked in by his sexist content, will align with his wider far-right politics."
"And then there is Andrew Tate. How does a man like this become a "trillionaire" guru to teenage boys? You may think he is ludicrous: a globular kickboxing star and former Big Brother contestant. But his reach is staggering: over 11 billion views on TikTok. And what is he pouring into young minds? Streams of grim misogyny: tales of hitting women, choking them, smashing their faces in if they cheat, while maintaining that any cheating on his part is just "exercise". It is as if someone has taken every type of woman-hater you can think of — a footballer, an incel, an Arab sheikh, the Tinder Swindler — and rolled them into one menacing, manscaped action doll, given them loads of guns, money and cars and made them say worse things than Donald Trump. He is a God to many boys."
"We had a good chat, Tate and I, but the guy gives me the horrors. Not all the time, but enough of the time, I simply hate what he thinks. If I had a son, I'd hate the thought of him being exposed to it, and I’m far from wild about my daughters having to deal with teenage boys who have soaked it in. I even agonised about whether I ought to do this interview. Although if the most googled man on the planet can't be written about in a newspaper, then I’m honestly not sure what any of us are here for."
"They kick you when you're down but they wanna kick it when you up."
"You do know it cost money to put a t-shirt on your back? You do know it cost money have a house, a home? You do know it cost money to eat? Get money, don’t let these people fool you."
"The key is to make it."
"I eat pears now, and shit like that. Shoutout to all the pear."
"Don't ever burn a bridge. Let me ask you a question: can you walk on water? Don't burn no bridge. Only God can walk on water."
"A lot of people see the glory, and don't know the story."
"It breaks my heart They ain't believe in us We the best music They played themselves While you hatin' and being jealous You could be over here embracin' that love More love, more blessings, more life GOD DID You either win with us, or you watch us win."
"Few concerns are as central to Islam as the search for knowledge (‘ilm). In the Koran God commands the Prophet, by universal Muslim consent the most knowledgeable of all human beings, to pray, “My Lord, increase me in knowledge!” (20:114). Muslims must imitate him in this quest. “Are they equal,” asks the Koran, “those who know and those who know not?” (39:9). The answer is self-evident. Hence, as the Prophet said, “The search for knowledge is incumbent upon every Muslim.”'"
"Knowledge is the most all-encompassing of the divine attributes, which is to say that “God is Knower of all things” (Koran 4:176, 8:75, etc.). “Not a leaf falls, but He knows it” (6:59). Nothing escapes His knowledge of Himself or the other. “Our Lord embraces all things in knowledge” (Koran 7:89). The only attribute said to have the same all-encompassing nature is mercy, which is practically identical with existence.’ “Our Lord,” say the angels in the Koran, “Thou embracest all things in mercy and knowledge” (40:7)."
"The Koran commonly refers to the knowledge brought by the prophets as “remembrance” (dhikr) and “reminder” (dhikra, tadhkir), terms that derive from the root dh-k-r. The Koran calls itself by these words more than forty times, and it refers to other prophetic messages, like the Torah and the Gospel, by the same words. The basic Koranic understanding of the necessity for a plurality of prophets is that Adam’s children kept on falling into heedlessness and forgetfulness, which is the shortcoming of their father. The only cure for this shortcoming is the remembrance that God provides by means of the prophets."
"If forgetfulness and heedlessness mark the basic fault of human beings, dhikr (remembrance) designates their saving virtue. Just as forgetting God leads to the painful chastisement of being forgotten by him, so also remembering God leads to the joy of being remembered by him: "Remember Me, and I will remember you" (2:152)... God sends the prophets in order to remind people of the Covenant of Alast. They do so by reciting God's signs and mentioning their debt to him. People should respond to the prophets by remembering God, an act which demands that they mention him in prayers of glorification and praise (thus affirming both his tanzih and his tashbih). Those who respond in this manner are the people of faith, since to have faith is to recognize or remember the truth of tawhid in the heart, to mention it with the tongue, and to put it into practice by following the instructions brought by the prophets.Those people who fail to make the correct response are the truth-concealers. Although they recognize the truth in their hearts, they deny it with their tongues and refuse to follow the prophets' instructions. This, in short, is the drama of prophecy and the human response. All of it is connected explicitly by the Koran to the word dhikr, or to closely related words derived from the same root (such as dhikra, tadhkira, and tadhakkur)."
"Like the philosophers, Sufis aimed explicitly at overcoming the forgetfulness endemic to the human “soul” or “self” (the same word nafs is used in both senses). Like them they offered broad overviews of reality rooted in metaphysics (ilahiyyat, “the divine things”) while describing the human soul as a microcosm, created in the “form” (sura) of God. God, as the possessor of “the most beautiful names” (Quran 7:180), is “the most beautiful Creator’ (Quran 23:14) who “formed you and made your forms beautiful” (Quran 40:64, 64:3). Both Sufis and philosophers held that the soul’s original divine form, created in the “most beautiful stature” (Quran 95:4), corresponded perfectly with God and the macrocosm. The soul, however, had fallen out of balance because of forgetfulness and the misuse of free will, so it needed purification and rectification.... Repeatedly the Quran asks it's readers to heed the signs. “In the earth are signs for those with certainty, and in your souls, What, do you not see?” (51:20-21). It rebukes them for not employing their seeing, hearing, understanding, and witnessing to perceive the signs: “They have hearts but do not understand with them, they have eyes but do not see with them, they have ears but do not hear with them” (7:179). It pays close attention to the soul’s diverse attributes and character traits (akhlaq), praising the beautiful and condemning the ugly. Some forms of Quran commentary - an activity undertaken by specialists in every school of thought - interpreted many verses as allusions (isharat) to the manner in which the soul experiences the divine presence while climbing the ladder toward realization."
"The first function of the prophets is to “remind” people of their own divinely given reality. In speaking of this “reminder”, the Quran employs the word dhikr and several of its derivatives (é.g., dhikra, tadhkir, tadhkira). Moreover, it calls the human response to this reminder by the same word dhikr. The “reminder” that comes from the side of God by means of the prophets calls forth “remembrance” from the side of man. The use of the one word for a movement with two directions—from the Divine to the human and from the human to the Divine—is typical of the Quran’s unitary perspective. Here in fact there is only one motivating force, and that is the Divine activity that makes manifest the good, the true, and the beautiful, even if it appears to us as two different movements. Moreover, the Quran also makes it eminently clear that “remembrance”—the human response to reminder—does not mean simply to acknowledge the truth of tawhid. The word itself also means “to mention”. On the human side, dhikr is both the awareness of God and the expression of this awareness through language, whether vocal or silent."
"If dhikr represents both the function of the prophets and the proper human response to the prophets, guidance (huda) represents the divine attribute that is embodied in the prophets. It sums up in a single word both God's motivation for sending the prophets and their activity in the world. If the opposite of dhikr is forgetfulness and heedlessness, the opposite of guidance is misguidance (idlal) and leading astray (ighwa). Just as the prophets incarnate God's guidance, so also the satans incarnate the quality of misguidance and error...Besides Satan, others are also said to be the source of misguidance. Among these is caprice, which we have already met as the worst of all false gods: "Follow not caprice, lest it misguide you from the path of God" (38:26)."
"To be human is to be born with the fitra, which is an innate recognition of tawhid that is represented mythically by the Covenant of Alast and the Trust. There is nothing extraneous or superadded about this fitra—it is precisely what makes people human. But the fitra tends to become obscured by upbringing and circumstances, and then people become less than human. They are "deaf, dumb, blind—like the cattle; no, even further astray." Dhikr is the all-important remedy that makes possible the actualization of the fitra. Dhikr is both God's merciful response to heedlessness, and the human response to God's mercy."
"The idea that human beings recognize tawhid innately is often expressed by using the term fitra, which is commonly translated as "primordial nature" or "innate disposition."...The Koran employs the word fitra itself only once, along with the verb form of the word. Here we translate the verb as "bring forth." The Koran is addressing Muhammad and, by extension, every Muslim: "Set thy face to the religion as one with primordial faith—the fitra of God according to which He brought people forth. There is no changing the creation of God. That is the right religion, but most people do not know. [Set thy face to the religion] by turning to Him. And be wary of Him, and perform the salat, and be not one of those who associate others with Him." (30:30-31) Here the Koran connects religion with the nature that human beings were given when they were created. By being human, they have accepted the Trust and entered into the Covenant of Alast. They were taught the names, created in God's form, and singled out for God's vicegerency."
"In short, already in the Koran and the Hadith, we find the idea that human beings are created with an innate capacity that allows them to understand things as they really are, but this capacity is clouded by the human environment. The function of the prophets is to “remind” (dhikr) people of what they already know, while the duty of human beings is simply to “remember” (dhikr). Having remembered, they return to the innate capacity from which they have never really become separate.’ If the human spirit knows God and affirms tawhid at the moment of its creation, this is because this spirit is not completely separate from God. In describing the creation of human beings, the Koran says that God molded Adam’s clay with his own two hands, then blew into him of his own spirit. The spirit is God’s breath, and Muslim thinkers were well aware of the implications of the metaphor. Breath is different from the breather; yet it is also the same, since a person without breath is a corpse. The divine breath that animates human clay is not identical with God, nor is it completely different. Human beings are near to God through their spirits, but they are far from him through their bodies made out of clay. The qualities of spirit and body lie at opposite extremes. The spirit is perfect, luminous, alive, rational, aware, intelligent, powerful, desiring, speaking; in short, it possesses all the attributes of God. But the body displays none of these qualities to any perceptible degree. It is merely earth and water, which represent the lowest of created things. When God blows the spirit into clay, this gives rise to the soul or self (nafs), which is an intermediate reality that possesses qualities of both sides. Hence the soul—which is the level of ordinary awareness—lies between light and darkness, perfection and imperfection, intelligence and ignorance, rationality and irrationality, awareness and unawareness, power and weakness. Within the soul, the innate capacity is represented by the luminous qualities of the spirit that are only dimly present. Actualizing the innate capacity in its fullest measure is seen as the goal of human existence. The soul must be transmuted such that its darkness becomes fully infused with spiritual light."
"The potential infinity of the objects of human knowledge goes back to the fact that the creatures have already been “taught” this knowledge, for it is latent in the cosmos through God’s nearness or self-disclosure to all things. Since we already know everything, coming to know is in fact a remembrance or recollection (tadhakkur). In the process of explaining this, Ibn al-‘Arabi refers to the “taking (of Adam's seed) at the Covenant” (akhdh al-mithaq), when the children of Adam bore witness to God’s Lordship over them before their entrance into the sensory world. The Koran says, “When thy Lord took from the children of Adam, from their loins, their seed, and made them testify touching themselves: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, ‘Yes, we testify’” (7:172)."
"The verse of Alast continues by explaining God's purpose in calling everyone to witness: ""Lest you say on the Day of Resurrection, "As for us, we were heedless of this," or lest you say, "Our fathers associated others with God before us, and we were their offspring after them. What, wilt Thou destroy us for what the vain-doers did?"" (7:172-73) Interpretations of this verse differ, but many authorities maintain that it means that on the day of judgment, people will be held responsible for recognizing the truth of tawhid, whether or not they have heard the message of a prophet. However, they will not be held responsible for the specific teachings of a prophet if such teachings have not reached them."
"Many Muslim thinkers refer to the lost heart by the Koranic term fitra or “original creation.” Fitra is the divine form that God bestowed upon Adam when He created him; or, it is the divine spirit that, according to the Koran, God blew into the clay of Adam in order to bring him to life. Any discussion of “origins” in Islam has everything to do with explaining how God created the universe in stages, beginning with the invisible divine spirit, the breath that God blew into Adam. This spirit is called by many names, such as the First Intelligence, the Supreme Pen, and the Muhammadan Spirit. It is a single reality that is aware of all things and gave Adam his knowledge of all the names, Or, we can say that the First Spirit is the creative command of God, his word “Be!” to all things."
"Every attribute of God is found in the innate disposition (fitra) of the human being. The path to perfection involves bringing these attributes out from hiddenness to manifestation."
"The key to the Islamic intellectual tradition is precisely the intellect, which is nothing but the soul that has come to know and realize its full potential. Inasmuch as the soul possesses this potential, it is often called fitra or innate disposition. If we employ the language of the Qur’an, the fitra is the very self of Adam to whom God “taught all the names” (2:31). It is the primordial Adam present in every human being. At root, it is good and wise, because it inclines naturally toward tawhid, which stands at the heart of all wisdom and forms the basis for the acquisition of true knowledge of God, the universe, and the self."
"To the extent that people fail to actualize their fitra, they remain ignorant of who they are and what the cosmos is. To the degree that they are able to actualize their fitra, they come to understand things in their principles, or in their roots and realities. In other words, they grasp things as they are related to God or as they are known to God. They do not remain staring at phenomena and appearances. Rather, they see with God-given insight into the real names of things. These names subsist eternally in the divine intelligence, which is the spirit that God blew into Adam after having molded his body from clay."
"The human spirit is also God's spirit. The Koran attributes the spirit breathed into Adam to God with the pronouns “His” (32:9) and “My” (15:29, 38:72). Hence this spirit is called the “attributed spirit” (al-ruh al-idafi), i.e., attributed to God, a term which suggests its ambiguous status, both divine and human at once. The spirit possesses all the spiritual or angelic attributes, such as luminosity, subtlety, awareness, and oneness. Clay stands at the opposite pole of the existent cosmos: dark, dense, multiple, dispersed. No connection can be established between the one and the many, the luminous and the dark, without an intermediary, which in man’s case is the soul, the locus of our individual awareness. The spirit is aware of God, though not of anything less than God. But we—at least before we have refined our own souls —have no awareness of the spirit. Clay is unaware of anything at all. The soul, which develops gradually as a human being grows and matures, becomes aware of the world with which it is put in touch in a never-ending process of self discovery and self-finding. Ultimately it may attain to complete harmony with the spirit."
"The primacy of thought is made explicit in the first half of the Shahadah, the testimony of faith: “There is no god but God.” This is the one truth upon which all of Islam depends. The tawhid that is expressed here is not contingent upon the facts and events of the world. It is essentially a thought, a logical and coherent statement about the nature of reality. In the Qur’anic view of things, tawhid guides the thinking of all human beings inasmuch as they are true to their innate disposition (fitra). Every messenger from God came with tawhid in order to remind his own people of their humanity. In this way of looking at things, true thought is far more real than the bodily realm, which is nothing but the apparition of thought. This is not to say that the external world has no objective reality, far from it. It is to say that the universe is born from the consciousness, awareness, and thought of the divine and spiritual realms."
"It should be obvious that by real thought I do not mean the superficial activities of the mind, such as reason, reflective thinking, ideation, cogitation, and logical argumentation. Rather, I mean the very root of human existence, which is consciousness, awareness, and understanding. The Islamic philosophical tradition usually referred to this root as ‘aql, intelligence. Thought in this sense is a spiritual reality that has being and life by definition. In contrast, the bodily realm is essentially dead and evanescent, despite the momentary appearance of life within it. Intelligence is aware, but things and objects are unaware. Intelligence is active, but things are passive. Intelligence is living, self-conscious, and dynamic, but things are empty of these qualities in themselves. In its utmost purity, intelligence is simply the shining light of the living God, a light that bestows existence, life, and consciousness on the universe. It is the creative command whereby God brought the universe into being, the spirit that God blew into Adam after having molded his clay, and the divine speech that conveys to Adam the names of all things."
"To lose the ability to see with the eye of tawhid means to fall into seeing with the eye of shirk, or associating other gods with God. If the Qur’an considers unrepented shirk the one unforgivable sin, this is no doubt because it entails an utter distortion of human understanding, a corruption of the human fitra, and an obscuration of the intelligence that is innate to every human being."
"The growth of the human soul, the process whereby it moves from darkness to light, is also a growth from death to life (hayat), ignorance to knowledge (‘ilm), listlessness to desire (irada), weakness to power (qudra), dumbness to speech (kalam), meanness to generosity (jud), and wrongdoing to justice (qist). In each case the goal is the actualization of a divine attribute in the form of which man was created, but which remains a relative potentiality as long as man does not achieve it fully. All the “states” and “stations” mentioned earlier can be seen as stages in the process of actualizing one or more of the divine names."
"On the one hand, human beings return to God by the same invisible route followed by other creatures. They are born, they live, they die, and they are gone, no one knows where. The same thing happens to a bee or an oak tree. This is what Ibn al-‘Arabi and others call the “compulsory return” (ruju idtirari) to God. Whether we like it or not, we will travel that route. “O man, you are laboring toward your Lord laboriously, and you shall encounter Him!” (Koran 84:6). On the other hand human beings possess certain gifts which allow them to choose their own route of return (this is the “voluntary return,” ruju ikhtiyari). Man can follow the path laid down by this prophet or that, or he can follow his own “caprice” (hawa) and whims. Each way takes him back to God, but God has many faces, not all of them pleasant to meet. “Whithersoever you turn, there is the Face of God” (2:115), whether in this world or the next."
"I’ve been told, ‘you’re not a Muslim, you’re a disgrace to Pakistan, Pakistan won’t accept you,’ but I do come from a Middle Eastern background and I am Muslim, not the way my parents are, but by practice. My sister covers her head, she’s modest, married, and has kids. My mom covers her head and prays five times a day, I pray two times a day but I’m still a practicing Muslim."
"I am a practicing Muslim, so I kind of have an internal conflict sometimes. One of the biggest main sins it's hard to be forgiven for is adultery — having sex without marriage is a sin and doing it multiple times a day as an escort is one of the major sins that you will not be forgiven for, and I am fully aware of that, but yeah, I still pray."
"Over 30 years ago, Donald Trump took out full page ads calling for my execution. On the day he was arrested and arraigned, here is my ad in response."
"We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves, we are special because of our organization."
"This campaign is for every person who believes in the dignity of their neighbors and that the government's job is to actually make our lives better."
"You know, this is not the first time that President Trump is going to comment on myself, and I encourage him -- just like I encourage every New Yorker -- to learn about my actual policies to make the city affordable But if he continues to focus on persecuting political enemies and on trying to detain and disappear New Yorkers, be it on the basis of their documentation or their sexual orientation or their politics, that is someone that I will fight time and again."
"We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD."
"Every day in Gaza has become a place where grief, itself, has run out of language, I mourn these lives and pray for the families that have been shattered. Our government has been complicit through it all. This must end. The occupation and apartheid must end."
"We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF."
"Thank you, my friends. The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, "I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity." For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty."
"I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few. New York, tonight you have delivered. A mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that."
"On January 1st, I will be sworn in as the mayor of New York City. And that is because of you. So before I say anything else, I must say this: Thank you. Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past. You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership. We will fight for you, because we are you."
"Because of you, we will make this city one that working people can love and live in again. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics."
"Now, I know that I have asked for much from you over this last year. Time and again, you have answered my calls — but I have one final request. New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know. We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count, held it because we cannot afford to exhale. Thanks to all of those who sacrificed so much. We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn."
"I will wake each morning with a singular purpose: to make this city better for you than it was the day before. There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us simply to more of the same. And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn. New York, we have answered those fears. Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy. And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do."
"Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru: "A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance." Tonight we have stepped out from the old into the new. So let us speak now, with clarity and conviction that cannot be misunderstood, about what this new age will deliver, and for whom."
"This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt. Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia: an agenda that will freeze the rents for more than two million rent-stabilized tenants, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal child care across our city. Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come. This new age will be one of relentless improvement. We will hire thousands more teachers. We will cut waste from a bloated bureaucracy."
"Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a Department of Community Safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on. Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception. In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another. In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too."
"And we will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong — not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power. No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election. This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another. We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about. For years, those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January 1st, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone."
"Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up."
"We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed."
"New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us. When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them."
"A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all. And we must chart a new path, as bold as the one we have already traveled. After all, the conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate. I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this."
"Let the words we’ve spoken together, the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together. New York, this power, it’s yours. This city belongs to you. Thank you."
"I appreciated the meeting with the President and as he said, it was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City — and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers, the eight and a half million who call our city their home who are struggling to afford life in the most expensive city in the United States of America. We spoke about rent, we spoke about groceries, we spoke about utilities. We spoke about the different ways in which people are being pushed out, and I appreciated the time with the president. I appreciated the conversation. I look forward to working together to deliver that affordability for New Yorkers."
"I think both President Trump and I, we are very clear about our positions and our views, and what I really appreciate about the President is the meeting that we had focused not on places of disagreement, which there are many, and also focused on the shared purpose that we have in serving New Yorkers, and frankly that is something that could transform the lives of the eight and a half million people who are currently struggling under a cost of living crisis with 1 in 4 living in poverty. And the meeting came back again and again to what it could look like to lift those New Yorkers out of struggle and start to deliver them a city that they could do more than just struggle to afford it but actually start to live in it."
"My fellow New Yorkers: Today begins a new era."
"I do not stand alone. I stand alongside you, the tens of thousands gathered here in Lower Manhattan, warmed against the January chill by the resurgent flame of hope. … I stand alongside over one million New Yorkers who voted for this day nearly two months ago — and I stand just as resolutely alongside those who did not. I know there are some who view this administration with distrust or disdain, or who see politics as permanently broken. I stand alongside neighbors who carry a plate of food to the elderly couple down the hall, those in a rush who still lift strangers' strollers up subway stairs, and every person who makes the choice day after day, even when it feels impossible, to call our city home. And while only action can change minds, I promise you this: If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you."
"A moment like this comes rarely. Seldom do we hold such an opportunity to transform and reinvent. Rarer still is it the people themselves whose hands are the ones upon the levers of change. And yet we know that too often in our past, moments of great possibility have been promptly surrendered to small imagination and smaller ambition. What was promised was never pursued, what could have changed remained the same. For the New Yorkers most eager to see our city remade, the weight has only grown heavier, the wait has only grown longer. In writing this address, I have been told that this is the occasion to reset expectations, that I should use this opportunity to encourage the people of New York to ask for little and expect even less. I will do no such thing. The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations. Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try."
"For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public. I cannot blame anyone who has come to question the role of government, whose faith in democracy has been eroded by decades of apathy. We will restore that trust by walking a different path: one where government is no longer solely the final recourse for those struggling, one where excellence is no longer the exception."
"And if for too long these communities have existed as distinct from one another, we will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from—the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers."
"In a city where the mere names of our streets are associated with the innovation of the industries that call them home, we will make the words "City Hall" synonymous with both resolve and results. As we embark upon this work, let us advance a new answer to the question asked of every generation: Who does New York belong to? For much of our history, the response from City Hall has been simple: It belongs only to the wealthy and well-connected, those who never strain to capture the attention of those in power. Working people have reckoned with the consequences. Crowded classrooms and public housing developments where the elevators sit out of order. Roads littered with potholes and buses that arrive half an hour late, if at all. Wages that do not rise and corporations that rip off consumers and employees alike."
"This will not be a tale of one city, governed only by the one percent. Nor will it be a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor. It will be a tale of eight and a half million cities, each of them a New Yorker with hopes and fears, each a universe, each of them woven together. The authors of this story will speak Pashto and Mandarin, Yiddish and Creole. They will pray in mosques, at shul, at church, at Gurdwaras and Mandirs and temples. And many will not pray at all. They will be Russian Jewish immigrants in Brighton Beach, Italians in Rossville, and Irish families in Woodhaven — many of whom came here with nothing but a dream of a better life, a dream which has withered away. They will be young people in cramped Marble Hill apartments where the walls shake when the subway passes. They will be Black homeowners in St. Albans whose homes represent a physical testament to triumph over decades of lesser-paid labor and redlining. They will be Palestinian New Yorkers in Bay Ridge, who will no longer have to contend with a politics that speaks of universalism and then makes them the exception."
"If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from, the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers. And it will be New Yorkers who reform a long-broken property tax system. New Yorkers who will create a new Department of Community Safety that will tackle the mental health crisis and let the police focus on the job they signed up to do. New Yorkers who will take on the bad landlords who mistreat their tenants and free small business owners from the shackles of bloated bureaucracy. And I am proud to be one of those New Yorkers. When we won the primary last June, there were many who said that these aspirations and those who held them had come out of nowhere. Yet one man's nowhere is another man's somewhere. This movement came out of eight and a half million somewheres — taxi cab depots and Amazon warehouses, D.S.A. meetings and curbside domino games. The powers that be had looked away from these places for quite some time — if they'd known about them at all — so they dismissed them as nowhere. But in our city, where every corner of these five boroughs holds power, there is no nowhere and there is no no one. There is only New York, and there are only New Yorkers."
"Eight and a half million New Yorkers will speak this new era into existence. It will be loud. It will be different. It will feel like the New York we love. No matter how long you have called this city home, that love has shaped your life. I know that it has shaped mine."
"To live in New York, to love New York, is to know that we are the stewards of something without equal in our world. … Where else could a Muslim kid like me grow up eating bagels and lox every Sunday? That love will be our guide as we pursue our agenda. Here, where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home. Not only will we make it possible for every New Yorker to afford a life they love once again — we will overcome the isolation that too many feel, and connect the people of this city to one another."
"For too long in our city, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it. Our City Hall will change that. These promises carried our movement to City Hall, and they will carry us from the rallying cries of a campaign to the realities of a new era in politics."
"Two Sundays ago, as snow softly fell, I spent 12 hours at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, listening to New Yorkers from every borough as they told me about the city that is theirs. We discussed construction hours on the Van Wyck Expressway and E.B.T. eligibility, affordable housing for artists and ICE raids. I spoke to a man named TJ who said that one day a few years ago, his heart broke as he realized he would never get ahead here, no matter how hard he worked. I spoke to a Pakistani Auntie named Samina, who told me that this movement had fostered something too rare: softness in people's hearts. As she said in Urdu: logon ke dil badalgyehe. [people's hearts have changed] 142 New Yorkers out of eight and a half million. And yet, if anything united each person sitting across from me, it was the shared recognition that this moment demands a new politics, and a new approach to power. We will deliver nothing less as we work each day to make this city belong to more of its people than it did the day before."
"Here is what I want you to expect from the administration that this morning moved into the building behind me. We will transform the culture of City Hall from one of "no" to one of "how?" We will answer to all New Yorkers, not to any billionaire or oligarch who thinks they can buy our democracy. We will govern without shame and insecurity, making no apology for what we believe. I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical. As the great Senator from Vermont once said, "What's radical is a system which gives so much to so few and denies so many people the basic necessities of life.""
"We will strive each day to ensure that no New Yorker is priced out of any one of those basic necessities. And throughout it all we will, in the words of Jason Terrance Phillips, better known as Jadakiss or J to the Muah, be "outside" — because this is a government of New York, by New York, and for New York. Before I end, I want to ask all of you, if you are able, whether you are here today or anywhere watching, to stand with me. I ask you to stand with us now, and every day that follows. City Hall will not be able to deliver on our own. And while we will encourage New Yorkers to demand more from those with the great privilege of serving them, we will encourage you to demand more of yourselves as well. The movement we began over a year ago did not end with our election. It will not end this afternoon. It lives on with every battle we will fight, together; every blizzard and flood we withstand, together; every moment of fiscal challenge we overcome with ambition, not austerity, together; every way we pursue change in working peoples' interests, rather than at their expense, together."
"No longer will we treat victory as an invitation to turn off the news. From today onward, we will understand victory very simply: something with the power to transform lives, and something that demands effort from each of us, every single day. What we achieve together will reach across the five boroughs and it will resonate far beyond. There are many who will be watching. They want to know if the left can govern. They want to know if the struggles that afflict them can be solved. They want to know if it is right to hope again. So, standing together with the wind of purpose at our backs, we will do something that New Yorkers do better than anyone else: We will set an example for the world. If what Sinatra said is true, let us prove that anyone can make it in New York — and anywhere else too. Let us prove that when a city belongs to the people, there is no need too small to be met, no person too sick to be made healthy, no one too alone to feel like New York is their home. The work continues, the work endures, the work, my friends, has only just begun."
"The oath on the Quran may have made headlines, but the more significant question is not what book Mamdani swore on. It is what stories, alliances, and blind spots shape the political movements that shaped his rise to office."
"It's finally happened, the Democrats have crossed the line. Zohran Mamdani, a 100% Communist Lunatic, has just won the Dem Primary, and is on his way to becoming Mayor. We've had Radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous."
"New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, speaking with ABC News the day after achieving an upset in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, said that he believes his strategy that focused on affordability and economics could be a blueprint for Democrats across the country. "I think there's a question of how we return back to what made so many of us proud to be Democrats," Mamdani told ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott in an interview on Wednesday."
"Since the '70s we've had the Financial Emergency Act, which calls for a balanced budget. And so the budget should also be thought of as a set of choices that the mayor and the City Council make about the allocation of resources. Mamdani has been clear about the priorities he would set in a way that this current administration has not done. And look, we're going to be in a pitched battle next year with a federal administration that's withholding funds. New York State passed its budget as if none of this were happening. New York City passed its budget as if none of this were happening. And what Mamdani has shown us is he's reaching out across the board. And yes, that's a coalition to get elected. It's also a coalition to govern."
"I just looked at her with this sadness...And she said, go. Just go. Go, go, go,"
"It was just incredible...I felt whole"
"There's just so much that one person can take""
"I started making phone calls...I started calling Mogadishu, the airport" ([16:30])"
"We all cried and jumped for joy""
"I realized in no place else in the world would a story like this with an ending like that be possible other than the United States of America, the greatest nation in the world,"
"I've always felt like this was my country. Please don't send me back." ([02:45])"
""I felt like the love of my life had just broken my heart." ([16:50])"
""The country that I love so much restored my faith and gave my sister a second chance." ([17:05])"