Dick Gregory Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The funniest jokes you know aren't from comics but relatives, friends - from your life. That's the funniest stuff.

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

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

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

It's cool to be healthy.

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

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

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

I would have painted the White House black. I would have!

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Don't have a high school diploma? You're in my Cabinet. Why? For 200 years, a lot of Cabinets have existed in our government. Powerful men. Well-educated. So let's try something totally new.

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

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

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.

America has the mightiest military on the planet, and they didn't get there with entertainers.

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.

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.

When I went south in the 1960s, I knew I could die. If I went down there and did what I did up in Chicago and made all of those hatin' white folks laugh, then I would have been defeated.

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

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

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.

Luck is opportunity meeting up with preparation. So you must prepare yourself to be lucky.

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

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.

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.

I was born and raised in St. Louis, and this little town, eight blocks away, place no one ever heard of, a black man there commands the attention of the world for months? That ain't my world.

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

Audiences feel no hatred from me. Because I'm not bitter.

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

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

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