Dick Gregory > Quotes

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

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

“One of the things I keep learning is that the secret of being happy is doing things for other people.”
― Dick Gregory

“I never learned hate at home or shame. I had to go to school for that.”
― Dick Gregory

“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.”
― Dick Gregory

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

“The only good thing about the good old days is they're gone.”
― Dick Gregory

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

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

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

“I was learning that just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.”
― Dick Gregory

“Makes you wonder. When I left St. Louis, I was making five dollars a night. Now I'm getting $5,000 a week — for saying the same things out loud I used to say under my breath.”
― Dick Gregory, From the Back of the Bus

“They told me there was very little racial prejudice in Hawaii. Like a woman is just a little bit pregnant.”
― Dick Gregory, Nigger

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

“And then the foreman told another boss to put me down in the furnace pit. "Nigger can take the heat better," he said. Well, the system wasn't going to beat me. I stood up next to that furnace, and I ate their goddamned salt tablets and just refused to pass out. They weren't going to make me quit, and I wasn't going to give them cause to fire me. I'd lean into that blazing pit until my face would sting, and when the lunch whistle blew I'd fall on the floor and vomit blood for half an hour and I'd clean it up myself.”
― Dick Gregory, Nigger

“I guess that makes me as white as you now, boy. I got your spit inside me.”
― Dick Gregory, Nigger