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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

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Dick Gregory
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: October 12
Died: 2017
Died: August 19
Athletics Competitor
Autobiographer
Comedian
Entrepreneur
Politician
Social Activist
Social Critic
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
Richard Claxton Gregory
Medicine
Sick
Situation
Race
Understand
Qualify
Makes
Negro
Doesn
Expert
Experts

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...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.
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Once I realised the value of making people laugh, I got very good at it. Fast.
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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.
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A Klaner KKK is a cat who gets out of bed in the middle of the night and takes his sheet with him.
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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?
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If it wasn't for Abe Lincoln, I'd still be on the open market.
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When I lost my rifle, the Army charged me 85 dollars. That is why in the Navy the Captain goes down with the ship.
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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.
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That's easy, to stand in a nightclub, where most of the people that come in, they came to see you.
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If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one.
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Black Americans are the only people in history who are for education instead of liberation. George Washington wasn't beating up on British for the right to open a college! The line isn't Give me education or give me death.
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To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.
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Being white is a job in America. You take that away, you better get the soldiers out.
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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.
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What happens to Black Folks today, happens to White Folks tomorrow.
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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.
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I wouldn't mind paying taxes... if I knew they were going to a friendly country
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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.
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Every holiday on the calendar, I check in a hotel and fast - I don't eat, I don't drink, I don't talk.
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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.
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