Dick Gregory Quotations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If they took all the drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine off the market for six days, they'd have to bring out the tanks to control you.

When I lost my rifle, the Army charged me 85 dollars. That is why in the Navy the Captain goes down with the ship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's a God force inside of you that gives you a will to live.

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

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

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

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

I wouldn't mind paying taxes... if I knew they were going to a friendly country

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

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

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

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

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

Riches do not delight us so much with their possession, as torment us with their loss.

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

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

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

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

Once I realised the value of making people laugh, I got very good at it. Fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King was really telling us it's not about love, it's about being lovable. 'I love you baby and if I can't have you no one else will is frightening,' but once you become lovable we become safe and that's where I think we'll end up.

We do not believe, had he been white, that he would be dead. And when we black folks say to America that we're not going to tolerate it, it's going to stop.

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

I consider myself always a humorist. And I think anybody who tells jokes or makes people laugh is humor.

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

That's easy, to stand in a nightclub, where most of the people that come in, they came to see you.

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

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

Some kind of way, we have to say enough is enough.

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

At the very last moment, Nature would force you to blink your eye. Nature will protect her own.

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

What happens to Black Folks today, happens to White Folks tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why would I want to call myself a conservative after the way them white racist thugs have used that word to hide behind? They call themselves new Republicans.

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

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

Whenever the dollar is held supreme and capitalistic interests dominate, a higher value will always be placed upon property rights than upon human rights.

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

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

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

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

If democracy is such a good thing, let's have more of it.

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

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

Martin Luther King taught us all nonviolence. I was told to extend nonviolence to the mother and her calf.

I didn't realize, when I decided to be a comic, that a black person had never been allowed to stand flat-footed in America and talk to white folks. It never happened before.

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

Laughter is the best way to release tensions and fears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NAACP is a wonderful organization . . . But do you realize if tomorrow morning we had complete integration, all them cats would be outta work?

[A politician is] a person skilled in the art of compromise. Usually an elected official who has compromised to get nominated, compromised to get elected, and compromised repeatedly to stay in office.

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

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

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

It's cool to be healthy.

Why are black folks singing Amazing Grace which is a song about a white slaver's conversion?

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

What price would God demand from the churches for having the audacity to lighten the color of his son's skin, and straighten out his nappy hair?

The free man is the man with no fears.

The only person on the planet saying derogatory things about his woman is the black man.

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

When you've got something really good, you don't have to force it on people. They will steal it!

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

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

I don't know why America always thinks she has to run all around the world forcing people to take our way of governance at the barrel of a gun. When you've got something really good, you don't have to force it on people. They will steal it!