A biography for Dick Gregoryhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Coconut milk is the only thing on this planet that comes identically to mother's milk.”
“I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.”
“Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten.”
“When you have a good mother and no father, God kind of sits in. It's not enough, but it helps.”
“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.”
“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'?”
“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 used to get letters saying, 'I didn't know black children and white children were the same.'”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Once I realised the value of making people laugh, I got very good at it. Fast.”