It’s wrong to look at what we call ‘Enlightenment values’ as some fad of the 18th century. It’s deeply rooted in ancient history.
Call
I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it.
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.
The thing to do, it seems to me, is to prepare yourself so you can be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud. Somebody who may not look like you. May not call God the same name you call God – if they call God at all. I may not dance your dances or speak your language. But be a blessing to somebody. That’s what I think.
We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, ‘magnified’ Man.
I call on the Western democracies and primarily on the leader of the free world, the United States: Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a convenient temporary solution… Israel will not be Czechoslovakia.
If you have the feeling of choice, if you feel free, you will be better off. And when I say better off I mean that if people feel they have control over their lives, they call in for fewer sick days from work. They have a lesser probability of having a heart attack or stroke. They live longer. They’re happier.
In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be.
Quakers almost as good as colored. They call themselves friends and you can trust them every time.
I’m going to have to call up Spike Lee. I did a cameo for him in ‘Malcolm X,’ and I’m trying to get him to do my life story and the history of the Black Panther Party.